Warbird Information Exchange

There's no hard and fast rules in North America governing safety outside the immediate aerobatic box. However, organizers worldwide need to start thinking in these terms before the regulators come down with heavy handed legislation which could adversely effect the air show industry. If you have to alter your flight line - do it. If you have to close roads to keep vehicles and pedestrian traffic from congregating under flight paths - do it. If you don't do your own housekeeping, somebody else will do it for you, and I guarantee you will not like the results.

Cheers,

Tom Walsh.

It's not always possible to shut down area roads during a show. At Alliance, here in Fort Worth, you would be shutting down the main N-S highway for hundreds of thousands of vehicles, one of two E-W highways for several counties, the secondary reliever road for the N-S and 5 major rail lines. It would cost the show in the tens of millions of dollars to do that, besides the thousands of cops it would take. In addition, that would also kill all access to the airport. It would take several hours just to unsnarl the resulting traffic jams.

It's already bad enough when they shut down FM-156 and Highway 114 for the 3-4 hours after a race at TMS. I've had to detour 30+ miles out of the way to get to work when the race is over too close to my commute time.

BTW...the Blues asked for a huge sterile area a couple of years ago and were told fat chance, to live with what the show could control or don't come.

This type of accident is one of the most common airshow crashes. The reason he was dropping was that in an attempt to recover his loop he had exceeded the critical angle of attack. When you watch the video you can see when his descent rate pick ups (that's what you see and suggest he's dropping). At that point he is dropping and descending out of control, it's sometimes called a "mush". The relative wind over the wings is at an angle where there is no longer smooth airflow over the top of the wing. The wing is no longer generating lift. It's an accelerated stall. With enough altitude you can pitch down and re-establish airflow over the wing and regain controlled flight. In this case and considering that it can take several hundred feet to recover from the stall, he didn't have sufficient altitude or time. I would be very surprised if, once the investigation is concluded, there is anything found to be mechanically wrong with the plane itself.
Tom Bowers

Nice analysis, but the points many have missed is that it wasn't a loop in the true sense, and that the fatal maneuver was conducted outside the airfield boundary, and in my view, not in keeping with what would be described as the normal display profile. (i.e. perform a loop over the Airfield on the designated display line/axis, in this case, approximate crowd centre).

If you look closely at the main footage used by the media (shot by YouTuber Dan Tube well away from the airfield on a hill to the NE), you can see that the aircraft pulls up well before the airfield boundary (over the field between the airfield and the A27), and as it reaches the top of what's being described as a loop, some bank to the left is applied with the pull continuing, and thus rolling off axis to the inverted (looking almost like an exaggerated wingover). It seems to 'wallow' slowly at the top with a gentle pull through while height is being lost, until a heavy pull is initiated close to the ground and it mushes in off the display line, with tragic results.

Having been to many airshows over the years, and seen many different aircraft displayed including Hunters (and this particular aircraft), it seems very odd for the pilot (highly experienced in the airshow environment and on high performance jets) to perform such a maneuver, outside of the airfield, and therefore out of most of the crowds view. (To the crowds right and slightly rear in this case).

It doesn't make any sense.

And that's my problem with those who are saying that aerobatics at airshows shouldn't be done over roads etc.

They are not, and is definitely not the norm (airfields that have main roads close to the runway will have a set minimum height that you can fly over it), so there is something amiss here, and I guess only the pilot will know the reason things turned out the way they did.

So Tom, your description/theory on the aerodynamics side maybe pretty much correct, but the question that needs to be asked is what events lead to this situation occurring, given all that I have said above.

Cheers

Paul