Not much more to add other than that. Story here: Youtube video from witness here. It looks like one of the participants made a grave error, and ended up crashing his P-51 into spectators.
I have no word as to the number of casualties. The linked story quotes a race official calling it a “mass casualty situation.” I am very surprised by the news, as I had thought air racing, while quite dangerous for the participants, was safe for the spectators.
Wow, it must have crashed right into a grandstand or something as there are apparently at least 75 injured, many critically…
(no word on deaths, but I guess that’s going to change before long)
Awful accident, and my best thoughts and prayers go out to those hurt or worse…
The Reno Gazette Journal story is here: being updated as more information becomes available.
That’s terrible, for the spectators, the pilot, and the plane.
There have been enough airshow crashes to know that if you’re going to see one there is a non-zero chance of being killed in an accident, even more so when the planes in question are competing in close proximity to each other.
My non-expert but 300 hours air crew experience would be I think he had a heart attack/stroke/ something. I’ve never known a pilot that wouldn’t do their best to avoid other people, even to their own death. The way.the.nose.of the aircraft just went down means, to me, he wasn’t there to control his stick.
Or there was a catastrophic hardware failure that prevented the pilot from controlling the plane.
My dad told me that Bill Barnes (son of Pancho Barnes) was going to fly his P-51D in formation with an F4U Corsair and a bomber (a B-29?) over Fox Field. I put my super-8 camera in a backpack and hopped on my Enduro. 60th St West runs straight to the airport. I saw a black plume in the distance.
A coolant line had burst or come loose and sprayed Bill with scalding liquid. He was likely dead before he hit the ground. The mechanic in the jump seat may have died on impact. The pilot today could have had a medical issue, or there may have been a mechanical issue with the aircraft. Something may have just snapped, as happened at an airshow a couple of weeks ago. It’s too early to say.
According to the Reno Gazette story he was 74 years old; while he presumably had passed a physical, that does increase the plausibility of some sudden catastrophic physical problem like a stroke killing or disabling him.
What a tragedy for all involved.
It looks like this air show may have had other crashes (1994, 2010). Is this a “race” or a “show”? Is that normal to have that kind of crash rate?
It’s both an airshow and a series of air races.
All airshows in the U.S. have very strict rules about where spectators can be, and the aircraft only perform aerobatic maneuvers in a carefully delineated “box”. It’s designed such that an out of control aircraft would likely crash away from spectators through positioning, and by not permitting aircraft to direct their momentum toward spectators during aerobatic maneuvers. But I don’t know how that relates to races rather than aerobatic performances.
Makes me very sad. It’s my nightmare to see something like that at an airshow.
3 dead, 56 wounded is the current casualties.
This from CNN:
So it sounds like the pilot was having mechanical problems and may even have tried to avoid the crowd.
Interesting also that there was no fire. Surely he didn’t just run out of fuel? Is it possible someone screwed up and never fueled the plane?
According to this story, this is at least the 3rd fatal crash there since 2007. The others apparently didn’t involve spectators, but 4 pilots were killed. There might have been collisions involving multiple planes, so how it’s unclear how many separate incidents there were.
Small airplanes don’t always burst into flames on impact, even on extremely violent impact. Sort of like car crashes don’t always result in flaming wrecks, despite what Hollywood would have you believe.
Some of those close to the crash site have reported being splashed with fuel as well as peppered with debris, which would seem to indicate that there was, in fact, fuel in the airplane.
Didn’t know that about small aircraft and hadn’t read about fuel being splashed, so ignorance fought. Thanks.
aluminum aircraft striking the ground with bladder tanks helps the situation. It looks like he went in at a pretty steep angle.
Sucks, and I’m sure it was terrifying. But, hey, this ex-wife-thing lives down there – maybe she got some shrapnel out of it, you know, like a souvenir! Here’s hoping she got a trophy ([quiet]in her face[/quiet])!
“I saw body parts and gore like you wouldn’t believe it. I’m talking an arm, a leg,” [Witness Maureen Higgins of Alabama] told the newspaper. “ The alive people were missing body parts. I am not kidding you. It was gore. Unbelievable gore.”
28 of them have life-threatening injuries, though, so I’m worried that the death toll will jump.
Spooky post-name combo in the OP, and even more so when I found that the name of the plane that crashed was “Galloping Ghost”.