...with about $18 million tax dollars.

Good thing we've got nothing better to do in Afghanistan.



Fish on...

Todd

P.S. Nothing was seriously hurt except a seriously expensive piece of military hardware.

And someones pride.

Damn....

I don't think it was joy-riding.
That thing had some kind of fail going on.

Nobody hurt.
But yeah, Ka-Ching goes the cash register.

I can't believe all those guys stood around that landing zone while he was coming in so hot.

Fishy

I don't really see anything that points to mechanical failure. It appears to me as though the machine stalls (wing stall not engine) on the climb after buzzing the buildings and the pilot doesn't have enough elevation to recover. They lose the tail rotor in the bounce which of course leads to the grand finale.

Not the first time a little military flying fun has gone wrong. My guess is a few somebodies are probably without jobs after that stunt. Lucky to have lived.




The guy that was flying this plane had a long and well documented history of showing off and taking unreasonable risks to the point that many would not fly with him. They now use his "legacy" as a case study for breakdowns in decision making and chain of command in the context of risk management. His wife and kids were at the show.

It looked out of control to me in the first few frames.

I don't see anything that indicates loss of main or tail rotor authority in the early part of the clip.

He approaches in a straight line, banks a short turn over the buildings, and starts a steep climb (all indicating intact authority), which to me looks like he either stalls out on, or something happens in the cockpit to restrict the pilot ability to manipulate the controls. He tries to dive out of it and/or autorotate to the ground, but doesn't have the room to get it done. No external indications (smoke, vapor trail, etc.) of a mechanical failure, but that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't lose power. Seems unlikely though as those ships have two engines.

Just looked squirrelly at the front end. A panicked recovery attempt, maybe.

I think that the way the crowd was lined up, they were going to do a planned, high speed pass over the snow field. Camera guy was there, etc.

Maybe they came in too low, tried to fix it, and everything went south.

How's it go? There are old pilots and bold pilots but there are no
old bold pilots.

What a goat.

That was quite a display of piloting skill.

It's obvious to me that both the chopper pilot and the B-52 pilot were concentrating on the emergency on the ground.


Not the one that existed, but rather the one they were about to create.

with Dan.

This was just on the news.
Stupid.

My parents said years ago, cars will have wings n fly by the time you drive... HOLY SH!T am I glad that never happened...those are nasty fender benders...

I get the feeling that the operative words are 'density altitude'.

That could very well be the thing...
Maybe the trick worked at sea level and not so much at high altitude.
What was that 10,000 or something ?

Just a guess.

AGL was likely more critical in this instance

Being fairly cold, the performance lost due to the moderate altitude, as compared to sea level, was likely countered by the significantly cooler temps.

He was obviously operating well outside of autorotation requirements. When/if things go wrong in an aircraft, being farther from the ground is almost always a good thing.

Isn't EVERY flying accident an AGL issue, because if you were still AGL, we wouldn't be talking about an accident, would we?

Ii didn't look like an autorotation attempt to me. It looked like his wing delivered less lift than he was expecting, and he pancaked that f'er into the ground while attempting a high-speed, low-altitude fly by.

Whatever the case may be, the outcome won't be good for his resume - or the taxpayers' pocketbooks.

I think the B52 guy forgot about how much altitude you lose in a
steep turn/ Rudder becomes elevator and he needed a bunch more
up.