F-4 Phantom crashes at airshow in Greece:
No.
I think the airplane + pilot was overwhelmed by the turbulence, wasn’t thinking go-around, and was just flailing madly trying to stay upright and sorta in control when he happened to flail blindly into the helo itself, not just its wake.
Had he applied full power and set flaps to anything less than 20 at the first sign of wacky turbulence he’d have been above the turbulence a good 30 seconds before he hit the helo. I don’t believe we know what flap setting the pilot was using. I’m overseas right now and the NTSB site doesn’t want to load for me.
I stumbled across this article today updating an event from some time last month. As best I could search, we didn’t post about anywhere upthread: Air India A320 issued stall warning when seatbelt signs off, injuring 24, investigators say | Reuters.
Key points being the airplane lost all hydraulics for some brief interval of time. Which left the airplane mostly uncontrollable. Fortunately it didn’t get too stupid before normalcy returned.
Now whether that was an actual hydraulic failure, or some sort of monitoring glitch where the pumps were still making pressure but the airplane’s computers thought otherwise is unknown, at least to me. I’d have said it’d be borderline impossible to have all 3 systems fail at once, absent major battle damage, or a pilot switching them off. Which battle damage they did not have. @Richard_Pearse?
I mentioned upthread a fairly common 737 oops where a pilot, usually the FO, inadvertently switches off one of the two hydraulic systems. OTOH, the 737 can be flown adequately with zero hydraulics, so that falls in the “Mostly harmless; easy to correct” category of errors. Not so on later fancier machines largely or utterly dependent of hydraulics for flight path control.
As a separate sidelight, there’s some scandal brewing about drug / alcohol use among Air India pilots.
And we’ve got the festering sore of the government and the company, who’re intertwined a bunch, being unable to admit in public that the B787 crash last year was a suicide.
Lotta mess over at Air India these days.
What‘s the word in the aviation industry about the worldwide jet fuel supply situation, in view of the Strait of Hormuz still not being open, and damage to Russian refinery/transport capacity?
Shortly after the beginning of the Iran war the IAEA warned that there could be shortages within months. These seem not to have occurred yet (at least I did not notice any news reports). Even as the Hormuz situation stays unresolved and Ukraine has successfully hurt Russia‘s petroleum products exports.
The only thing that came to my attention is that Lufthansa has shut down its Cityjet short haul operations citing high fuel prices, and also cancelled some of its own short flights (such as a Stuttgart-Vienna flight in January 2027 that I was booked on)