It must have been a very fluke hit, at exactly the spot to put max stress on the junction between the fuselage and the wing structure.
Wonder if @LSLGuy has any thoughts on it?
It could be a case of the other plane being in a blind spot (the pilot can’t see through the nose of his plane). Here is a video of the P63. Thoughts on this possibility?
But remember this planes were not randomly flying around; they were part of an airshow. So someone was in charge of determining when they took off and the routes they took–and I think that person goofed.
Nope, it was broken into two sections: the tail and the wings forward. It is clear from the fourth video in this set.
It looks like the P63 hit the B17 at precisely where the wings are attached to the fuselage. B17s took a lot of damage in WWII but I’ve never before seen that kind of separation.
I can’t say for sure and for once don’t want to speculate (don’t feel I have enough information) but airplane blind spots are a very common factor/cause in mid-air collisions. It will definitely be looked at as a possibility.
I swear I tried figuring out where breaking news should go, determined it was MPSIMS (though it feels a bit off for dramatic events), and … then I apparently posted elsewhere. 
Nope: @naita you did it right. @Pullin did it wrong and the mods merged his thread into yours. Not that any of this is a big deal.
Pullin’s “I looked in MPSIMS” and puzzlegal’s “merged and moved them” got me doubting my memory. Good to know I wasn’t misremembering things this time at least!
Speaking in generalities about the mishap, not the threading/posting here …
As to the impact itself, a midair involves massive forces far beyond what the airplanes can withstand. By comparison an anti-aircraft shell is tiny, even with its explosion. The P-63 hit the fuselage just behind the wing with a lot of closure = monster kinetic energy. Including its wings, the B-63 is a lot bigger across then the B-17 fuselage diameter. It’s like somebody took an axe to a much narrower stick. FYI modern fighter tactics for making a last-ditch ramming kill on a heavy are not much different.
In any structural failure whether due to collision, battle damage, overload, or material fatigue, it’s easy to forget the effect of the airspeed. The airplane looks static as it flies along. But every bit of it is sitting in a 200mph, 300mph, or even higher continuous blast of wind. It’s sailing serenely along inside a Cat 5 hurricane or much worse. Once stuff gets bent out of its normal alignment or even fairly small pieces of structure are torn, the wind blast working on the now-misshapen or now-weakened structure is what finishes tearing the rest of the airplane apart.
Which is one of the reasons rather small warheads can bring down rather large airplanes. A bit like a comparatively small bomb can put a crack in a water dam and then the lake behind the dam does all the work of taking the dam completely down. Or like the small blasts used in controlled demolition of buildings. Just weaken a bit of structure and let ever-present but normally invisible gravity comprehensively finish the job.
As to why it happened, clearly the P-63 didn't see the B-17 until it was too late and perhaps never saw him at all until the milliseconds before as the B-17 suddenly looms in his peripheral vision. So he inadvertently took a path that led him through it. While he thought he was on a path to do whatever was his role in the show.
To some degree these shows are scripted. And if this was supposed to be a mass gaggle of different airplane types forming up for a mass pass past the crowd, that means everyone is aiming for the same smallish area of sky at more or less the same time. And each solo pilot or crew only has their own eyeballs to see and track every other airplane in that sky. That can be a tall order.
Beyond that we can only speculate. I bet NTSB will have an equally hard time determining more than the trajectories of all the airplanes involved. The “why”, which is what really matters, will remain elusive.
As pure speculation, I suspect that 10 or 15 seconds before impact the P-63 pilot found himself a bit out of place, or a bit fast compared to the other fighters he was supposed to be tracking with. And so was focusing on maneuvering versus them (and the ground) get to where he belonged versus them. Somewhere in that process he lost track of (or had never sighted) the B-17. Which was, after all, painted in colors designed to make it hard to see from above.
Heck, it may be that not only did the P-63 end up wide & low versus his fighter wingmates, but the fighter leader may have been closer and lower versus the B-17 than he should have been, thereby cutting into the P-63’s buffer for any overshooting. There’s always a tradeoff between safety buffers and looking good and tight for the crowd. And the fighter leader is just using his eyeballs to judge this stuff.
As well, you want to get the gaggle assembled while you’re far enough away from show center that it’s all stable and calmed down while you’re in front of the crowd. If the fighter gaggle started their merge a bit behind their ideal positioning, they’d all be rushing a bit to get to the right place versus the heavy(ies) before the heavies inexorably advance to “on stage”. Again all judged by eyeballs and involving airplanes of lots of different types with different speed and acceleration / deceleration capabilities. Flown by people who don’t do this every day.
Lots of opportunities for goofs. Most of which will be harmless, and the show-goers will never be the wiser although for really big goofs the pilots’ debrief might get a bit … heated. Once in a great while though, somebody’s luck runs completely out and a crash results.
From @txtumbleweed ’s post above, one of the videos shows an angle which to me looks like the P-63 pilot has clear line of sight to the B-17.
The collision almost looks intentional. Or, maybe the P-63 pilot differed a heart attack before s/he could change its vector.
In one of the twitter links a kid can be heard asking “ was that suppose to happen?”
What were they expecting, a battle re-enactment?
Why are the twitter links spoilered?
The kid was surprised and shocked and didn’t understand what was happening. Absolutely normal reaction for a child.
These days a lot of entertainment involves watching things blow up, like video games, or movies, or cartoons. Even in live entertainment like something you might see at a theme park, you might see something that is supposed to look very realistically like something exploding. And then there are fireworks, which is literally just watching explosions for entertainment. In none of these things is anyone really supposed to get hurt.
It’s perfectly natural to be confused when a catastrophe happens right before your eyes and as a child wonder if it might not just be another illusion created for your entertainment. Especially if the other possibility is that you just watched six people die a fiery death.
If the pilot was looking somewhere else AND was unaware of the B-17s position, AND by bad luck their paths were aligned to intersect, that would look exactly like somebody who was aiming at the B-17. IOW “looks like” is totally different from “is”.
If he’d seen the B-17 2 or 3 seconds pre-collision we’d probably have seen the beginnings of an evasive maneuver. If he didn’t see it until a second or so, or maybe not until a millisecond or two before, then he may not have had time to process the surprising info, decide what to do, move the controls, and have the airplane respond enough for us to see the trajectory change from our distance.
Not trying to pick on you personally, but I’d not be surprised to see “It looks intentional therefore it was intentional” become part of a social media frenzy in our conspiracy theory crazed society. Speaking just for me I’d rather not tempt fate in that direction. YMMV.
@chela I spoilered them on posting, following the two-click rule in case folks didn’t want to pop in and see shattered airplanes right away.
Poking around on flight aware, and may have found the accident aircraft tracks and data logs. Not sure how long they will stay good; they get archived after a couple days. I imagine someone with more smarts than I is already pulling the ADS-B tracking info as well as looking for any audio to put together so we can get a better picture of what happened in the air.
I suspect this data is incomplete as we know the accident happened off the end of the runway and it doesn’t look like the tracks end there.
P-63 - N6763
B-17 - N7227C
Sure, which I why I qualified my statement as being from a layperson.
(But we have at least one factor other than just what it looks like, namely, aren’t these kinds of demonstrations supposed to be carefully planned and rehearsed, with any truly risky manœuvres ruled out or carefully planned for? Like jousting at the Ren Faire?)
(Technically, of course, it would be a conspiracy theory only I one proposed that a second person had been involved.)
Those tracks don’t look safe to me. I used to be able to afford to fly helicopters, in L.A. Helicopters have different rules from fixed-wings. For one thing, we operate a lot lower; like 400 feet AGL. (Transiting LAX airspace over the water, helicopters and airplanes had to maintain 100 feet or below.) Another thing is that we have our own frequency, and we must make position reports and communicate with other helicopters. Anyway, helicopters coordinate at points of interest. Typically, they set up a left orbit and everybody goes the same way and they keep each other in sight. They set up their own traffic patterns.
The Flight Aware tracks have a lot of turns in different directions and to not seem coordinated at all.
Maybe… I saw that same airshow at that same airport about 3 years ago, and it was a very well orchestrated thing. And those B-17s don’t do much very quickly- it would almost have to have been a mistake on the part of the fighter pilot- if nothing else, as the smaller, more nimble plane, he had a certain duty to avoid the big lumbering ones.
That’s why I am not sure of the ADS-B data being correct, but my understanding is the bombers are generally in a large pattern that parallels the crowd line and the fighters get pattern in the middle. It’s all worked out ahead of time on the ground.
CAF has been doing these for some 40 years (most famous is the Tora Tora Tora recreation of Pearl Harbor) and this is the first accident (I think, I don’t see any others noted on wiki) ) at one of their shows, so I don’t think we are looking at recklessness, it was just a really bad time to make an error.
It could have been worse, in the wide shot from the crowd line on the airport, a Stearman bi-plane is on the accident runway and just misses getting crushed by the wings and nose of the falling B-17, while the only flying B-29, Fifi, is holding short. A couple of close calls, there.
How good were the breaks on those older planes?