Crash at Reno Air Races

[Joe Public]

A plane crashed into the crowd at the Reno air races:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/09/17/nev....html?iref=BN1

I remember NorthwestUteFan was planning on going, so keep him in your thoughts.

[RobinFinderson]

Phew, I just noticed that NWUF is online, responding to this thread.

[NorthwestUteFan]

A plane crashed into the crowd at the Reno air races:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/09/17/nev....html?iref=BN1

I remember NorthwestUteFan was planning on going, so keep him in your thoughts.

Thank you very much for remembering, I really appreciate it.

I learned of this crash today as my 9 year old son and I were boarding the plane in Seattle. The plane crashed right into the box seats where I would have been tomorrow. Today was the final qualifying set of races, so the box was essentially empty. Tomorrow there would have been several hundred people sitting right in the place where the plane crashed.

I changed my flight plan, so my son and I will spend the weekend in SLC with my parents instead of at Reno. Sadly, this may be the last race weekend ever. I just don't know how they will be able to recover and regain insurance coverage in the future.

As of now, there are 54 injured with at least 3 dead.

[NorthwestUteFan]

The last time I went to the races was in 1999. I knew Gary Levitz (owned Levitz Furniture, lived in Park City) for several years through my employer, and also ran into him numerous times at the FBO at SLC International. He was a genuinely nice and caring guy.

He was flying a very interesting plane, Miss Ashley II. It was a worked over North American P-51, with the wings and horizontal stab from a Lear Jet, and a Rolls Royce Gryphon counter-rotating dual prop engine. The plane was just spectacular, and was a marvel of engineering and art. See the pic below.



In one of the races he suddenly had a problem and his plane basically fell apart in the air at 400+ mph. Watching the crash was bad enough, but knowing the man at the controls and realizing he was going to be killed was a sickening feeling that haunted me for weeks afterward.

I met Rick Brickert (lived at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon in Holladay/Sandy area) a few times in passing, but my dad knew him better. When the Pond Racer went in, Rick at least was able to fly the plane as far as possible into the crash, and was killed when the plane flipped and broke up on the ground. Somehow I am more at ease with that one than with Gary, who had zero options at 400 mph and 200 feet up.

This one today with Galloping Ghost was just tragic. It appears as though the pilot had a problem, veered to the right off the course, pulled up, and nosed over directly into the ground. He was moving fast enough to have control so I don't think the nose over was due to a high speed stall. It is highly probable that he pointed at the box/pit area to avoid the grandstands and just ran out of options. Tragic.

[SteelBlue]

Death toll now at 9. Crazy that those were your seats NWUF, that's got to make your spine tingle.

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[mtnbiker]

Looks like he lost the trim tab off the horizontal stabilizer, and lost control. Very sad.

[UtahDan]

No offense to anyone, but this seems like a stupid way for people to be careless with their lives to me. I am really glad you are okay NW.

[NorthwestUteFan]

You have your hobbies and they have their hobbies. Some adrenaline rushes are impossible to duplicate. Living up here in the Northwest I have run across several people who race hydroplanes. Many of them have flipped, and quite a few know somebody who has been injured very badly or killed. Same goes for riding a motorcycle.

The owner of my old company was an AF pilot in Nam, flying F-105s. After he returned home and retired from the Air Force he started flying light planes, but it just wasn't the same. He started racing Top Fuel dragsters, as that was the only way to get the same rush as flying the fighter jets.

Then he lost several friends in horrific accidents, sold his cars, disbanded his team, quit driving, and started a company to serve and sponsor the racers.

The saddest thing in my mind is most of the people sitting in the VIP seats on Friday were family members of the racers.

I also found out today that my SIL's parents (brothers FIL/MIL) were at the races Mon-Thurs and were sitting in the box. If the crash happened the day before they would have been affected, and if it happened today...the death toll may have topped 100 as there would have been at least 500 people sitting in the debris field, and I may very well have been a statistic. It is a good thing I decided to avoid taking work off yesterday to attend the races.

[NorthwestUteFan]

Check out this picture, and notice what is missing.

The new theory is that the seat broke and he couldn't get upright again to regain control of the plane after the trim tab broke off.

I wonder what the NTSB will finally conclude.



Compare that to these earlier pictures:





The cockpit and turtle deck of this plane were 'shaved' to the point the canopy just cleared the pilot's helmet. Something apparently went horribly wrong in that first picture.

RIP.

[creekster]

Check out this picture, and notice what is missing.

The new theory is that the seat broke and he couldn't get upright again to regain control of the plane after the trim tab broke off.

I wonder what the NTSB will finally conclude.





The cockpit and turtle deck of this plane were 'shaved' to the point the canopy just cleared the pilot's helmet. Something apparently went horribly wrong in that first picture.

RIP.

WHy was the tail wheel descended in that first pic? That seems very odd (and unlikely) to me.

[scottie]

Check out this picture, and notice what is missing.

The pilot??

[NorthwestUteFan]

Also notice the tail wheel is extended. That shouldn't be extended, and if it happened to slam open on the turn it would absolutely have affected the control of the plane. At 500+ mph I am surprised it didn't rip apart the aft fuselage.

It is very possible that the tail wheel extended, causing the plane to pitch upward violently (either through aero forces or perhaps damaging the elevator controls(?)), and the seat broke. If the seat is intact and the pilot was deceased, he would slump forward only slightly.

If the seat broke and he fell backward (reclined) into the fuse, he would have been completely unable to pull himself up while maintaining control of the plane.

[NorthwestUteFan]

One more possibility, and I think more likely: the trim tab ripped off (known) causing the plane to pitch up violently, which caused a GLOC on the pilot and also caused the tail wheel to drop.

I forgot about this, but Bob Hannah (former motocross racer from Idaho) had the trim tab rip off his plane in the mid 90s. His plane pitched violently upward and he passed out, regaining consciousness at 9k feet altitude. He had to claw his way back into position, pull back the throttle, and regain control of the plane. He survived, but if he input aileron control as he blacked out he would have rolled into the dirt just like this crash.

It would be pretty easy to over-'G' in this situation - 12G+ is not out of the question-, and people are guaranteed to pass out if they go much beyond 10 Gs. Fighter pilots have inflatable pants that squeeze blood out of the legs and into the torso when they go beyond 2-3 Gs.

I was at the Races in the late 90s when Miss America had a trim tab rip off. It didn't have much of an effect on the plane (i.e. it didn't cause it to go immediately out of control), but the pilot had to fight it hard to get it back on the ground.

FWIW, 3 of the now 10 confirmed dead were from the state of Washington.

[creekster]

Also notice the tail wheel is extended. That shouldn't be extended, and if it happened to slam open on the turn it would absolutely have affected the control of the plane. At 500+ mph I am surprised it didn't rip apart the aft fuselage.

It is very possible that the tail wheel extended, causing the plane to pitch upward violently (either through aero forces or perhaps damaging the elevator controls(?)), and the seat broke. If the seat is intact and the pilot was deceased, he would slump forward only slightly.

If the seat broke and he fell backward (reclined) into the fuse, he would have been completely unable to pull himself up while maintaining control of the plane.

SHould I be offended that you ignored my post above?

I am not sure about the notion of the wheel slamming open. I htink the oroingal P-51 had a manual menchanical link to the wheel (could be wrong though) and I am guessing that this highly modified plane had a hydraulic mechanism. If so, it seems unlikely that it would slam open.

[NorthwestUteFan]

SHould I be offended that you ignored my post above?

I am not sure about the notion of the wheel slamming open. I htink the oroingal P-51 had a manual menchanical link to the wheel (could be wrong though) and I am guessing that this highly modified plane had a hydraulic mechanism. If so, it seems unlikely that it would slam open.

You can choose to be offended if you desire. I didn't see your post until I posted my own, no offense intended.

The plane is 'highly modified', but it isn't highly modernized. It would still have the original linkage. The tail wheel slamming open in the turn is, as you suggest, highy unlikely. But if the trim tab ripped off and initiated the rapid, hard, upward pull it is possible for the wheel to slam downward.

Also remember this is a 70+ year old plane and metal fatigue in the linkage could have been a factor.

After Gary Levitz' crash I spoke with one of the plane's builders. He had suggested to the design engineers that they reinforce the aft fuselage to counter torsion. The P-51 apparently was somewhat weak in torsion, and he feared swapping a different set of wings and stab onto the existing fuse would load the fuse in an untested manner.

Unfortunately no non-WWII planes have been competitive in the races, so they continue to fly 65-70 year old planes and designs.