I bought my wife a Suzuki SX-4. It had more blind spots than Stevie Wonder. I nearly hit people in the supermarket parking lot twice.
I don’t have to worry about that anymore…
Why…?
My dad flew cargo planes in the Air Force. I remember one time as a kid I went with him to the squadron offices when he had to pick up some papers or something. There was a display case with lots of citations and trophies, and one mangled metal thing. I asked him what it was. He said it was a lantern that was used to mark the center of the target area when they were doing cargo drops at night. Someone had dropped a pallet right on top of it, and they kept it for the trophy case.
It’s a big sky, right up until it isn’t.
As @Magiver said upthread these sorts of displays typically involve flying on one or other side of distinctive features such as runways, taxiways, and fence lines. The goal is often to make a safe structured display look chaotic. You can have aircraft at the same altitude at different speeds if they are separated laterally. You can separate aircraft laterally and still have a spectacular display because of the position of the crowd. The most obvious example of this is opposing passes by demonstration teams. Of course they sometimes go famously wrong as well, generally because one or more of them ended up out of position.
The blind spot issue was a red herring. No low wing plane would be able to see the bomber while turning.
Each plane is flying a specific pattern that is based on ground references and altitude. this is what keeps them separated. The B-17 was making passes in both directions. I expect the flights are set up to mesh with the bombers which means their flight pattern is longer to accommodate the faster speeds.
The bomber pattern in the video shows a consistent pattern but they didn’t show the same number of fighter patterns. Somewhere in this accident one or both planes strayed from their flight path and/or altitude. I would think the P-63 should have established visual contact of the bomber prior to turning to ensure altitude and pattern separation. I’m not sure what the go around procedures would be if the bomber can’t be seen.
At this point I would like to see the specific flight envelope of both planes.
In a world where Randy Johnson can accidentally turn a bird on the wing into a splash and a cloud of feathers with one pitch, this is the only sane response. Golden BBs are real and they’re golden because they defy the odds. “Vanishingly unlikely to happen” is not “impossible”.
Still, something had to have gone drastically wrong in coordinating those flight passes. Maybe timing: somone arrived early or late relative to the others so two aircraft who were supposed to pass through the same point in space at different points in time unintentionally passed through the same point in both space and time, and physics says you can’t do that without consequences.
It shouldn’t be a timing issue because you had planes operating at different speeds and passing each other. The aircraft should have been operating in flight patterns that kept them separated laterally and vertically with enough wiggle room for both aircraft to drift and still remain at a safe distance.
That was in Tucson AZ in a spring trainng game against the San Francisco Giants. The batter was Giants outfielder Calvin Murray.
Big sky, little baseball? Tell that to the dove. Here is the exact moment it happened.
Here is a good video from SVP Air Safety Institute that explains how air shows are flown with established show lines for each airplane. The initial thought is the B-17 was on it’s show line and the P-63 pilot overshot his. One of the possible explanations was that the P-63 was in trail to the P-51’s and was getting too close and swung wide to maintain distance.
The video explains show lines and how serious it is taken if a pilot breaks the pattern. It would be interesting to hear the radio communications with the pilots because there would have been a warning given if they saw it in time. IMO this is one of those times when a mistake was made and it devolved so quickly that nothing could be done about it.
The blancorilio video posted above suggests to me that the entire parade section of the show was planned with too little room for error. For a demonstration/entertainment matter, it seems to me that there shouldn’t be tolerances so tight that the pilots will have to make such critical decisions if they find themselves out of step.
The suggestion was that the fighter pilot needed to make sure that he was staying in formation behind his leader but also not cross the dead line. It seems he found himself going to fast to make the turn behind his leader in time and so he had to go wide on order to recover without crossing the dead line. The formation was also flying so low that the fighter pilot couldn’t properly overtake the bomber by passing below the bomber.
So the pilot found himself caught between too many narrow tolerances and had to turn in a way that blinded him to the position of the bombers.
Sure, he probably made a mistake on not bailing out the formation altogether. However, the whole formation should have been planned in such a way that in case of error the pilot didn’t have so few options to recover safely.
To me, regardless of the degree of responsibility of the individual pilot, it seems that there should be much broader thinking about how these kinds of demonstrations should be planned in the first place, with plenty of room vertically, horizontally, and otherwise to allow for much more room for error.
How do you not mention it was Randy Johnson that threw the ball? The batter didn’t have a lot to do with that ball/bird interaction. 
BTW, Randy is now a photographer (he’s been spotted at NFL games taking photos) and this is his photography company logo:
The post was responding to a post that mentioned Randy Johnson by name and the video had Randy Johnson’s name in the title. That wasn’t enough?
I need more coffee. 
I make a mean brew: 
The bird was hit by a pitched ball – shouldn’t it have walked to first?
Well it likely was. Unless he was incapacitated he broke a rule that was absolute. The P-63 pilot appears to have crossed over into the B-17’s space. It would be like 2 jets coming at each other using a runway as a divider. Cross over the runway and something bad happens.
There is no such thing as zero risk. The people driving to the airshow risked death in their cars. there very well may be a flaw in the setup but it’s also possible it was a risk that couldn’t be mitigated.
Fan interference.
I just noticed the logo. Funny!
ETA — I hope you’ve had your coffee. 
I have. I don’t know that it actually helps me, but I’m a bit more awake now. 
Awake is good.