What part of out of control airplanes can go a long way did you not understand?
There’s two issues here. One is that crashes are most likely to occur on the most difficult turn, which is why it’s stupid to put fans there. The second is the flight path. I don’t know the exact telemtry of the flight, but if the crash happened around turn 8 the plane was likely headed in the general direction of the crow.d The fact that it landed where it did wasn’t some ridiculous fluke.
Th[quUOTE=Boyo Jim;14292588]When a plane is flying laps, every point on earth is along a tangent to its flight path. It is a fluke that a crashing plane hits one point rather than another, and the farther away from its planned path the more of a fluke it is.
[/QUOTE]
This is true but utterly meaningless.
It’s not a fluke that a plane going 400+ mph and banking 80 degrees through a turn experiences the greatest amount of stress load.
It’s not that densely populated. Mostly residential suburbs. It’s out in the hinterlands. I have not been to the races, but the north part of the airport is basically empty desert.
The airport that you would fly into on a jet is a different one. This is RTS:Reno Stead, not RNO:Reno-Tahoe.
Yes I know. I was just trying to point out the ridiculousness of a place being too crowded to find a spot for bleachers, yet ok for an air race. I looked a google maps, and like you note, they have virtually unlimited space immediately north of the airport.
One issue that I think the NTSB and the FAA will have to address is the evaluation of aircraft after they have been modified. I may be wrong, but I think Leeward was the only pilot to fly The Galloping Ghost for at least the last two years. The modifications his team made may have given the aircraft “unusual” characteristics that another pilot, with no money in the game, may have rated dangerous. Leeward was determined to beat Strega, especially its owner. He may have accepted risks (like a snap roll tendency due to the very short wing) that a thorough evaluation by a third party would have uncovered and black flagged. Successfull manufacturers never have the designers of an aircraft write up flight test reports. Leeward may have had the “I can handle anything” attitude I’m sure some race pilots have.
I understand it very well. I’ve been flying airplanes for 25 years. The fact is, there has not been a spectator fatality at Reno for 50 years. And this particularly fatality scenario required the airplane to veer off the course, climb to a fairly high altitude, then roll towards the audience and plummet down. It didn’t just crash on a tangent to banked curve. In fact, had Galloping Ghost simply gone down in a straight line from its flight path it would not have been anywhere near the audience. It basically flew off the course by a substantial margin. Just what are you going to do to prevent that?
Your scenario of an airplane losing control in the banked turn and then continuing straight into the audience instead of continuing the turn around pylon 9 is simply not what happened, and it’s never happened in 50 years of racing at Reno.
The fans aren’t there. The most difficult turn is turn 8, which is quite a ways from the fans. Turn 9 is a fairly gentle turn that just pulls the airplanes parallel with the crowd. The fact is, the unlimiteds are going so fast that they stay significantly banked for a good chunk of the course.
I’m also not sure that the turns are where the most danger is. From what I’ve heard from race pilots is that the most dangerous period is the initial formation and the dive down onto the course, where the air is crowded and the airplanes throttling up to race speed. Then there’s the ‘valley of speed’, where the airplanes can descend low and go very fast. A lot of failures have happened there, as I recall. And it’s on the opposite side of the course.
Have a look at the diagram at the bottom of this page. Turn 8 is a MILE away from the spectators. The FAA approved the course. That page shows the math used to determine safety. The fact is, Galloping Ghost would have been on a safe line had it not gone high and then rolled towards the crowd. And I don’t know how you find a spectator area completely safe from an airplane going out of the control and flying off the course. It’s essentially a random act.
The plane was NOT headed for the crowd. It was well past turn 8, and pulling into the straightaway parallel to the crowd when the failure happened. The pilot was unconscious, and the plane zoomed to what appears to be well over 1000 feet high, then rolled towards the crowd and came straight down. Where it landed WAS a fluke.
It was about the same action as a jet making a high-speed pass down the flightline at an airshow, then suffering a mechanical failure and veering off into the crowd. It could have happened at any air show.
My favorite act, the Snowbirds, does a ‘bomb burst’ routine that has the jets coming straight at the crowd, then ‘bursting’ upwards. If one of those jets suffered a mechanical failure, it would go straight into the crowd. Several airshow acts do head-on passes in front of the crowd, with airplanes approaching each other from opposite directions at closure speeds up to 1000 mph. There have been accidents in the past where those airplanes clipped each other. It’s been sheer luck that one of them didn’t go out of control towards the crowd.
For that matter, any aerobatic performer could black out and lose control of his plane, or suffer a control failure that causes the airplane to veer off the course and towards the crowd.
Are you going to outlaw all air shows? Or make them perform so far from the crowd it’s not worth seeing them? Or can we admit that life has risks, and sport aviation has more than average, and let people decide for themselves?
Do you know anything about the unlimited class? Those planes are ALL dangerous. They all have unique flying characteristics. They blow engines and shed propellers all the time. There are usually multiple maydays at Reno in any given year. From what I’ve heard from unlimited pilots, it’s a fancy dance just to keep those things from killing you. All you have to do is apply the power too fast and the things will torque-roll onto their backs. Pilots are constantly adjusting numerous controls to keep them pointed in the right direction.
“Black Flagged”? Oh for Pete’s sake. The unlimited class is full of airplanes that are a total handful to fly. Speed is everything. It takes precedence over reliability and good handling characteristics. Many of those planes have clipped wings (or even completely different wings, like Miss Ashley’s Learjet wing). Some of them are purpose-built for the races. The Pond Racer (designed by Burt Rutan) was extremely radical. All of those planes are pushing the limits of the airframes and engines and pilots. That’s what unlimited air racing is all about. It’s extremely dangerous, but everyone knows that. Most of the audience at Reno is made up of pilots and they know exactly what the risks are.
And most of those race pilots would be right. By and large, they are some of the best pilots around. Lots of them are ex-military pilots. A few are astronauts (Gabrielle Gifford’s husband, a shuttle astronaut, was one of the pilots at Reno).
Leeward was a great pilot. The accident doesn’t appear to have been his fault. So let’s not start attacking his character or painting him as a reckless pilot who was trying to beat a rival at any cost. I’ve got news for you: EVERYONE there is trying to beat everyone else.
They’re doing what they love, and they know there are huge risks. By and large, they do it very responsibly and carefully. But pushing the envelope is always dangerous.
Have a look at that link I pointed to in my last message. Turn 8, the ‘radical’ turn, is about a mile and a half from the spectators, and it involves a course change of 53 degrees. Turn 9 is still a mile away from the spectators, and it involves a course change of only 3 degrees - it’s basically just a shallow correcting turn to make sure the planes are parallel to the audience. The airplanes should be relatively unloaded by then.
You can see by the diagram that the tangent lines from turn 8 would not take an airplane near the spectators during the period of highest load on the airframe. If you work out the force vectors, you’d see that the direction the airplane would take would be maybe 15-25 degrees off course, which would put the airplane down on a line crossing the threshold of the runway. Thousands of feet from the audience.
The arc on the diagram consists of the possible angles that the airplane could depart from, and the course design ensures that the aircraft are a mile away while there is still any angle that could point the aircraft at the crowd. That’s why turn 9 is there - to ensure that the airplanes are going parallel to the crowd by the time they are into the zone where momentum could carry them a long enough distance to reach the spectactors. Very similar to how airshow lines are set up.
The planes on course never get closer than 1/4 mile from the spectators, and are parallel to the spectators by the time they are a mile away.
Also, the most radical turn is not turn 8 - it’s turn 1.
Again, think about the failure mode here, and how unlikely and unlucky it was. First, most airplanes that have a mechanical failure at these speeds will simply come apart and come down in pieces. Had Galloping Ghost’s wing failured, it would have rained pieces across the runway and the infield - not into the spectators. Second, a failure that makes the airplane uncontrollable when it’s going 400+ mph at 100 feet in the air will usually put it into the ground very quickly. Third, if a failure doesn’t do one of those two things, the pilot usually has enough controllability left to get the airplane away from the crowd and to a high altitude where he can bail out or dead-stick in.
This accident left the airplane in flying condition so that it could continue to travel a significant distance, yet it also incapacitated the pilot so he couldn’t direct it away from the spectators. It also caused a pitch up to high altitude so it had time to travel the distance to the grandstand, then it finally came down on top of the spectators. That’s a pretty flukey set of conditions - one I’ve never seen before at Reno, ever. As in, we’ve never seen an airplane behave this way anywhere on the course, let alone in the 4-second window it had to be in for this to happen in a position to impact the spectators.
Voodoo Chile did something similar, but it didn’t roll over, so the pilot had time to regain consciousness and recover.
I’m sorry, but am I supposed to consider 10 deaths and 74 injured acceptable if it only happens once every 50 years?
Virtually every catastrophic accident has a long list of what ifs and odd circumstances that lead to the accident. But when you examine it closer those what ifs and flukes often look preventable. The layout of the course has two glaring flaws, which you have yet to address. (1) Plane’s energy being directed at the crowd and (2) Locating the crowd near a point with a high potential of plane failure.
Hold on, my scenario never included “continuing straight”. My scenario is:
and that’s exactly what happened. The plane failed around turn 8 and crashed in the general direction of its flight path.
If this were a Hazop in a plant I worked at, the process would have easily identified this. You start with a broad question: (1) Where are areas of high probability of plane failure? A sharp turn. After identifying that failure area you ask what happens if a plane does fail around the turn. The obvious answer is crash with a probability cone based on it’s flight path. This basic and ridiculously obvious analysis should lead you to locate the crowd elsewhere or modify the course.
You keep saying this, so I guess I’ll repeat my previous response. Planes moving at 500 mph can cover “quite a ways” easily.
Obviously not true. They are banked around the turns and relatively level in the straightaways. The plane was in a high degree of bank when it failed, and was not making a gentle turn.
Crashing in the general direction of your flight path is not essentially a random act.
It was not well passed turn 8. It was in a high degree of bank, meaning likely still completing turn 8.
Again, it’s not a fluke that the plane failed in that part of the course, and it’s not a fluke that it failed in the general direction of its flight path.
No, it’s not the same. Air shows have strict rules that the energy of the airplane can no be directed at the crowd during any stunts.
Yes, I’ve seen these stunts as well. The bomb burst isn’t particularly worrisome as the energy of the plane should be directed up if there were an impact. Head on passes aren’t particularly worrisome if they are done along the proper flight line. It’s keeping the basic rule of air shows. Don’t direct energy at the crowd while doing something with a risk of failure.
That would be a fluke because it would require a 90 degree turn away from the plane’s flight path. More importantly, you are doing everything possible to make the event safe while still having it.
Let’s see what I think about that:
I’m perfectly comfortable with the Reno show being sued for being grossly negligent. They showed a complete lack of common sense and basic safety measures in the design of their course.
Sam, what are your thoughts after seeing the last video? It appears that the bad things started to happen when the GG increased its bank in the turn past 90 degrees. Leeward’s dad taught my step-dad, who was a B-24 pilot on the first Ploesti raid, how to fly in the 30s, so Jimmy was a family friend. I don’t want any of this to be his fault, but we have to face the facts.
It’s not a mile and a half, it’s a mile. And hard turns are where stuff breaks. They’re traveling at 1/8’th mile per second. When viewed as accidents per hour instead of a “50 year” time span the results show the sport is more in line with the space shuttle program.
what I saw from the grandstands was a turn that put airplanes on a course into the crowd if stuff broke.
OK, that means the likelihood of more accidents in turn 1 exist over turn 8. that doesn’t change the likelihood of accidents in turn 8.
Galloping Ghost is not the first plane to suffer this type of structural failure. We’ll never know the stability of the plane after the failure because the evidence was destroyed. I don’t know how this will be looked at in view of what happened but there may be some changes in A/C structural requirements. I could see a requirement for 15G stress tests.
The interest in the Reno tragedy is coming from many directions. The following links came from a retired FedEx pilot and will put the lie to Galloping Ghost being a tired, pumped up, retread WWII relic.
The photographic records give a ground-up view of the assembly process of Galloping Ghost. Totally professional. Utterly professional. I doubt that there is an original North American part in the plane.
It had a seamless, rivet-free fuselage, wing and tail feathers. Completely custom cockpit, etc, etc. There are 190 detailed photographs in the first link and 128 shots in the 2nd - which detail the entire assembly process back in 2009 - including the infamous trib tab on the left rear elevator.
Excellent views of the horizontal stab, elevator, trim tabs (both left and right!) when you find them in link 1. Example - pic 86 .
http://www.warbirdaeropress.com/NewG...9-1/index.html
http://www.warbirdaeropress.com/NewG...9-2/index.html
Web site these came from http://www.warbirdaeropress.com/photogallery.html
For all you armchair quarterbacks pontificating on how dodgy the build quality was on “The Galloping Ghost”? After really analysing these photos, well, it’s my view that you lack empathy in a very big way.
The first two links are 404’s (not found)
I have edited the two links in my quote above. They are now correct… my apologies for my URL mistakes earlier…
http://www.warbirdaeropress.com/NewGallery/GG2009-1/index.html
http://www.warbirdaeropress.com/NewGallery/GG2009-2/index.html
No problem; fighting ignorance and all that…
Feathers – there’s your problem right there. 
Heh Heh, I know… I know…
Still, it’s a really “shit hot” photo montage worth checking out if you’re even remotely interested in engineering.
I’m not sure who you think is saying it’s poorly built but there is an obvious failure in the tail section that needs to be addressed.
As for being rivet free I don’t know where you got that from. It looks like pretty standard aircraft construction in the pictures. They may have added more flush rivets to it and thrown a get coat on the fuselage. The wing root fairings look like off the shelf items.
Looking at the tail section the control levers in the pictures look pretty substantial. If they failed then it will certainly draw a lot of attention to anybody flying unlimited races or aerobatic flights.
You clearly know nothing about the area or the sport of air racing. Using Google maps, one might draw the conclusion that Central Park is a good place to build parking garages.
It was a terrible, tragic freak accident. They will race next year, and the year after that on the same course just like they have been doing for 50 years. Probably less dangerous to spectators than a typical NASCAR race.
If it worries you so much, please don’t come.