Bad Crash at the Reno Air races.

[BPTactical]

Link please?

I'm on the Blackberry so I can't link it- Google, Yahoo and the major news outlets all had it yesterday.

[Tweety Bird]

http://www.katu.com/news/local/130198288.html

[SAnd]

A couple of questions for the knowledgeable.

Where did the pilot go? I have seen 2 or 3 pictures of the plane after it started the final maneuvers. I can't see the pilot in any of them. Would the shoulder/lap belts hold the pilot where we could see him if the he was incapacitated? The picture posted here clearly shows his head. It does look like he is sitting lower than in a P-51.

Wouldn't you normally need nose down on the elevator to counter the amount of lift generated by the wings at that speed? The pilot would have set the trim tab to a nose down. Would the pilot be able to push the nose down if he lost the trim tab?

I wonder if he got elevator flutter, either before or after the trim tab came off. The flutter shook the stick disabling the pilot or preventing him from maintaining control or damaging the elevator control system. Flutter vibration could also account for the tailwheel dropping down.

My sympathies to all that lost people.

[Singlestack]

On fox news today (maybe Megan Kelly at noon) they were saying the accident investigators are speculating the pilot's seat came loose/got ripped loose and fell backward into the fuselage!! Yikes! Having seen how cramped a P-51 cockpit is, I don't think there is room to "scrunch down" or bend forward so you couldn't be seen through the canopy. Pretty clear if the seat went back you wouldn't reach the stick or pedals...

Singlestack

[Tweety Bird]

I'm a Fox News fan but it seems strange to me that some "investigator" is actually allowing speculation to get out to the media. I have no doubt that they were told this b

Edit: No idea what happened to the rest of my post. Working through a public WiFi in a hotel causes lots of strange things.

What I was trying to say is that I have no doubt that Fox was told this stuff but I DO doubt that one of the real investigators would be speculating like this to the news media.

It would be hard for me to think the pilot wasn't securely strapped into a custom-fitted seat that was attached very securely to the structure. Anything could happen, I suppose, but a seat coming loose (at least as a CAUSE of the accident) doesn't seem plausible to me.

I suspect there was a mechanical failure due to some hamfisted, inept and dumbass mechanic like me signing it off.

[Ridge]

On fox news today (maybe Megan Kelly at noon) they were saying the accident investigators are speculating the pilot's seat came loose/got ripped loose and fell backward into the fuselage!! Yikes! Having seen how cramped a P-51 cockpit is, I don't think there is room to "scrunch down" or bend forward so you couldn't be seen through the canopy. Pretty clear if the seat went back you wouldn't reach the stick or pedals...

Singlestack

And holding on to the stick when it happened would pull it back, causing an intense climb and then dive...

[Scanker19]

A couple of questions for the knowledgeable.

Where did the pilot go? I have seen 2 or 3 pictures of the plane after it started the final maneuvers. I can't see the pilot in any of them. Would the shoulder/lap belts hold the pilot where we could see him if the he was incapacitated? The picture posted here clearly shows his head. It does look like he is sitting lower than in a P-51.

Wouldn't you normally need nose down on the elevator to counter the amount of lift generated by the wings at that speed? The pilot would have set the trim tab to a nose down. Would the pilot be able to push the nose down if he lost the trim tab?

I wonder if he got elevator flutter, either before or after the trim tab came off. The flutter shook the stick disabling the pilot or preventing him from maintaining control or damaging the elevator control system. Flutter vibration could also account for the tailwheel dropping down.

My sympathies to all that lost people.

I though the same thing when those pictures first came out. I thought they were file pictures at first because of not seeing the pilot.

[Ridge]

From ARFCOM:

A couple of factors about the crash (some of you guys need to work on your aerodaynmics knowledge):

To get maximum airspeed, these airplanes are run at full-aft CG, which is inherently much less controllable than when keeping the CG in the envelope
Breaking of the trim tab would most likely result in the airplane going to full-nose-up trim. He would have had some rudder input as well for his left pattern. Incidentally, this is pretty much how you snap roll an airplane, which is what appears to have happened, unsurprisingly.
3,500 HP.....8,000+ lbs. of airplane.....full aft CG.....he would have had to be able to bench press about 350 lbs., in one second, to get the airplane under control. His age is not a factor. Even you guys who CAN bench that much probably would have failed.
As far as pictures of him 'slumped forward'...under that many G's, he'd be pasted to the back of the seat or, like Bob Hannah, the floor of the airplane. In one of the pictures you can clearly see the canopy with no visible pilot. Most likely he was unconscious.

new video


This exact mechanical failure has happened before, with a much luckier result. Read about it happening to Hurricane Bob Hannah here: Voodoo Incident

Bob Hannah was an exceptional MX racer and was in superb shape, and very nearly lost his life. He was lucky that his snap roll resulted in a vertical climb instead of a nose down into the ground.

Found out from my brother that they found the telemetry box from the plane. He was told that the plane pulled 22.2 G's@ 500 mph, looped up and slowed to 375 and back to 500 when it hit the ground. 22 G's will kill a person fast!

For those who don't know what a G is, it's the equal of the force of gravity on our planet. If he was pulling 22 Gs, that means that a 200lb man would weigh over 4,000 pounds.

If that information is accurate, his bones probably turned to jelly once that plane pitched up. They also think the G forces broke the pilot's seat, which could have collapsed down and into the back of the plane, pulling the pilot away from the controls and out of view to anyone outside the plane.

But he was most likely dead before even nosed over towards the ground.

[hip55]

That airframe isn't capable of staying together at 22 g's.

It's my guess that the 22 g's was recorded at the time of impact.

[AR_ART]

Thats probably true about the number of "g's" on impact.

When I worked at this one place where we shipped sensitive equipment we had these little devices that were attached to the outside of the shipping box. They were to ensure the boxes weren't mishandled or dropped.

If memory serves me right it said something about 20 g's which i thought was almost impossible to attain if the box was dropped. So, the boss handed me one of those devices and told me to give it a good flick.

I did and it popped. I was amazed that's all it took... So, I'm not surprised they are saying maybe 22 g's going in...

That airframe isn't capable of staying together at 22 g's.

It's my guess that the 22 g's was recorded at the time of impact.