http://www.kontraband.com/videos/14339/The-Best-Air-Race-Pilot-EVER/
I admit I bit hook, line and sinker until I started reading all the comments elsewhere about why it should be a fake. Anyone know the particulars of this story and its veracity (or at least its plausibility)?
Those aerobatic planes are all engine and could easily hold their own weight on engine alone. I want to believe.
I don’t know the facts but IMHO it would be a lot of work to fake this and I can’t imagine why anyone would, unless there were money to be made by doing it. The comments on that page calling it a fake give no specific reason why they think so. Sure, such a video could be faked, but so could *any *video.
The plane sure looks like it’s out of control after the wing goes. The landing is probably lucky though the pilot was likely highly skilled.
The graphics and the physical behavior of the plane, especially as it lands, makes me 99% sure it’s computer-generated. No citation, just a gut feeling.
Edit: And now I do have a citation.
If the video is fake, it’s a very well done one consider all the shots required including a live action shot of the pilot opening the canopy at the end.
Acrobatic planes like that have immense power and even without one wing, there probably is enough airfoil surface to generate enough lift to pull off the landing. You see how he knife-edges right before touchdown? He’s using the vertical stabilizer and rudder as the main lifting surface. We know that planes can generate lift in the kinfe edge condition, and some of these planes can hang on their propeller only, so it’s not that hard to believe this was a real incident.
It’s easy for armchair pilots to say “that could never happen because…”, but it’s more useful to start with what you know a plane can do and see if it’s consistent.
The shadows beneath, and the not-quite-right shininess of the plane, make it look fake to me.
It’s photoshopped. You can tell by the pixels.
This is definitely fake. You can tell by the way the camera and plane moves at the end. Everything is simply very unnatural-looking. Reminds me of the substandard CGI in that Anaconda movie…
This webpage has a video with one James Andersson who claims to be the pilot, but I can’t find anything else confirming his identity. Googling his name gets a lot of links, mostly broken, claiming it’s a fake and part of a viral video campaign. I don’t know what they’d be promoting, but he has “Killathrill” on his jacket and a link on the links page.
Anyway, here’s the video:
Just opened One Day Fish Sale’s link; sorry, wouldn’t open before. Looks like there’s a lot of speculation that it’s a viral ad campaign for the clothing company KillaThrill.
I don’t know about the video in the OP, but it looks like it is possible to land a plane after losing a wing: Israeli F15
However, I wouldn’t compare an F-15 to an acrobatics plane.
A plane landing with one wing has happened. The vid in the OP may be faked but this one is not.
If you do not want to watch it basically an Israeli F15 was involved in a midair collision. The pilot did not realize how bad the damage was and decided to go ahead and land. Only after landing, when he turned around to shake his co-pilot’s hand did he see the entire right wing of the aircraft had been torn off! :eek:
Supposedly McDonnell Douglas sent engineers to see the plane because they could not believe it managed to fly much less land like that.
ETA: Damn your eyes Dan_ch! Last time I bother to write a bit before posting. Won’t get beaten to the punch again! 
This video seemed real enough up until 0:45 when several Inviolable Laws of Physics were clearly defied. Kinda pissed, I’d rather see the plane actually crash & spew flaming bodies onto the tarmac (running over several kittens in the process) than be taken in by a not-so-clever editing job. :mad:
The Israeli F15 video is awesome, though. It’s amazing how much abuse those Fokkers can survive!
That video is more fake than a 3 dollar bill, and not even well done; very amateur quality. The guys and I could pull off something better at the studio on a weekend.
Bad smoke, bad textures and shaders on the plane, horrible animation, fake shadows. It’s a mess. The pilot at the end I could bet they had some footage of that and aligned it to the CG plane, trivial stuff.
On the other hand this one wing landing is real, a large model plane, but terrific flying skills none the less.
It is definitely fake. at about 25 seconds, shortly after the wing falls off, he descends in a spin but he’s spinning the wrong way. A spin is caused by the inside wing being stalled and the outside wing remaining flying due to the rotation giving it a lower angle of attack. With the right wing gone the plane must spin to the right, in the video it’s spinning left. You don’t really need to see anymore than that.
There was a chap called Neil Williams who had one of the wings fold up while practicing aerobatics, he managed to fly an inverted circuit which kept the collapsing wing rigid and rolled upright as late as he could, he still did significant damage to the aircraft.
I don’t see any problems at the 45 second mark, he’s flying on the knife edge which is a common manoeuvre, it basically uses engine power and the keel surface of the fuselage to maintain altitude.
The aircraft doesn’t seem to have enough inertia as it lands though.
I can’t find the cite right now 'cause I don’t remember the exact year, but when I was living in Norfolk, VA in the mid-to-late 90s, there was a similar incident to the Israeli one referenced above - there was collision of two military aircraft(I believe they were F/A-18s) in a training exercise off the Outer Banks. Both were badly damaged, one with basically half a wing missing and the other missing a whole wing and both brought the jets home safely, landing at NAS Oceana.
Yes, I’m pretty sure it is. It is a “reenactment” of an event that actually happened. In fact One Day Fish Sale’s link refers specifically to this video.
My main concern is, aren’t these air races super well documented? Even if there had been no official video of the incident, there should have been plenty of mention of it.
Dude, get it right - artifacts.
Another give away, near the end as the camera is panning along with the plane, camera movement stops in anticipation of the plane turning back. Set up.
This was obviously made just to mess with people. They did really good on the graphics. The entire video is animated it seems. It just becomes much more obvious when you see the plane a little larger and the guy running towards it…