One of the Snowbirds died today in a crash in Kamloops, British Columbia.
The Snowbirds are the RCAF’s acrobatic team. They’ve been flying across Canada on a morale boosting effort, starting with flights in Nova Scotia after the killing spree there last month.
The jet was the second to take off, and seemed to develop trouble very quickly, with black smoke coming out of it.
One of the officers ejected, but at very low altitude. Sounds like that officer landed hard on the roof of a house and is in serious condition.
Another officer went down with the plane. She died in a firey crash on the front lawn of house in a residential area.
Sources don’t say which was piloting it, but the dead officer was apparently Capt. Jenn Casey. She’d been with the RCAF since 2014.
The Snowbirds flew over my town a few days ago and it was a pleasure to see them. I was saddened by this news. But I heard the injured person is expected to recover. I wonder what the cause was, since the training level is purported to be very high.
These planes are 55 years old. One former Snowbirds commander is reported as expressing his confidence in the safety of these planes, but there has previously been reports recommending their replacement.
Supposedly they are a good choice for the role, though they are a lot less cool than their CF-86 predecessors, or F-18s. The 500 million price tag for replacing them is no small factor I am sure.
By the flight behavior, I assume there was either damage to the controls or pilot injury caused by engine failure.
Terrible couple weeks for Canadian military aviation.
It would be most unusual for an engine failure to cause either of those, and there appears to be nothing in the video to suggest this.
What does appear is consistent with the pilot reacting to the engine problem by pulling up (natural and normal) but then getting too slow, resulting in a stall and spin entry.
There’s video of the flight and accident. From it, it looks like Xema described it: an immediate climb by the a/c into what appeared to be an attempted hammerhead turn, followed by a wingtip stall, one roll, and ejection by both seats midway through a steepening descent. A quick version of the ‘lost engine on takeoff, now turn back to the runway’ maneuver that kills many GA pilots when it doesn’t work. Understandable if the pilot is trying to avoid houses downrange of the runway.
Judging from other low altitude ejection videos, the airplane did not appear to be in such an attitude or with such a rate of descent that the ejections would be unsurvivable. Both seats ejected. It does not look like the PAO’s seat initiated parachute deployment though, and I guess the pilot’s parachute only partially deployed. AIUI, the seats are nearly as elderly as the a/c, and I wonder how an ACES II or Russian egress system would have performed under similar parameters.
Very brave of the pilot to try and guide the a/c away from residential areas. Otherwise, it would have been easy to eject at the top of the chandelle, and likely both occupants would be alive and unharmed.
I had no idea a chandelle would be an intended procedure at such a low and slow flight condition.
I am no pilot and have only played flight sims, but that experience would lead me to expect the exact disastrous results observed for such a maneuver. I find it hard to believe the steep climb was intentional and so surmised there was either injury or control loss involved.
The seats are zero / zero supposedly but I assume horizontal or partially inverted ejection so low is very bad. I could not make out the ejection from the video I saw.
I don’t know why you thought posting something snarky and insensitive would be appropriate in a thread about one person dying and another being severely injured.
Note that pool’s comment was probably sarcasm, not snark. The point being that the announced purpose of the Snowbirds current tour is morale-boosting in the time of coronavirus.
This concept has been (understandably) criticized for various reasons, which will surely continue in the wake of this accident. I’ll note that they need to fly to stay current, and the chance of an engine failure accident is much the same whether on tour or at their home base.
The thing that struck me yesterday the most was that they were supposed to be flying over us here on Vancouver Island but, because of bad weather, it got postponed. So they wouldn’t have even been in Kamloops. A very different day but for some clouds and rain. Who knows what would have happened. Would the plane have crashed? Killing people on the ground? Would the issue have been caught before hand? What a shame.
Recent reports have clarified that Capt. Casey was a public affairs officer with the Snowbirds. I take this to imply she was not a Snowbirds pilot.
In any case, the pilot of this flight was Capt. Richard McDougal. He is reported to be hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries from landing on the roof of a house after what must have been a very low parachute deployment.
The design is 55 years old, but the individual A/C might be more of a newer vintage and its been noted that the Tutors have been upgraded over the years.
That being said, its about time we started to replace them with a newer design. Unless a compromise can be found that would allow for a zero zero ejection system to be installed, then it would be my choice to stand down the birds.