Also something elts thats extremely strange... no fire ball......
No fireball possibly means no fuel, or very little fuel. Reno air races are mostly short races, so there's no reason for pilots to carry massive amounts of fuel. Either that or the angle of attack with respect to the ground was so acute that the plane flew apart before the fuel had a chance to ignite.
The odd thing about the crash is that if you look at it the plane dives directly into the ground at something like a 70 degree angle, coming from above the other planes and in the other direction. It looks like the cockpit was closed, that no flaps were deployed and that the pilot didn't attempt to maneuver away from the crowd as he dove in. Not to be sensational, but it almost looks like a WW2 era kamikaze attack. Not your typical air race crash.
My dumb ignorant guess is that the pilot encountered a problem earlier, quit the race and tried to gain altitude as a precaution to deal with it. Then, for some reason he became incapacitated.
I guess that he was unconscious or dead because there's whole lot of desert around the Reno air races yet he still managed to hit the stands. Had he been in control, he wouldn't have been at that angle that close to the ground.
Also, speed might have been high enough that he didn't have much control, but it doesn't look like he was attempting to angle away from the stands at all. If you're a responsible pilot, even if you know you're going to die, you at least try to aim the plane so that it doesn't kill anyone else. So, my guess is that he was dead or dying.
The only other alternative I can think of is that he somehow lost elevator control coming out of the previous turn, went upwards and what we're seeing in the video is the tail end of a half loop. Even so, in that case, he might have had time to bail out at the top of the loop, but it doesn't look like the canopy was open.
He was an old guy (80 years) doing a fairly physical sport (pulling even moderate Gs IS physical). If he had an undetected heart problem and/or high blood pressure, he could have easily had a massive coronary or stroke.
The FAA accident investigators are going to be all over this one, but my bet is that it's the autopsy on the pilot that will tell us the most about the accident.
Edit: Latest reports indicate that the pilot's age was actually 74 and that his medical checks were up to date. Younger, still certified to fly, but no spring chicken.
Other spectators have said that he suffered mechanical problems coming out of "the far turn" (I guess the one farthest from the spectators nearest the crash) and gained altitude to deal with it. The mystery is why he was coming into the ground at such an acute angle. Possibly he stalled out and didn't have the altitude to recover. Presumably the FAA will have multiple eye witness accounts and might have radio communications from the pilot. Should be an interesting investigation.
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Topic: P-51 Galloping Ghost crashes into crowd at Reno (Read 38782 times)
