Next, could somebody explain a snap roll? I’m tired of telling people it’s not just a really fast aileron roll.
Heh, and after that we can explain stalls to the general public. I’d like to go back in time and find out who decided to name an aerodynamic principle the same thing as an engine failing and kick him in the nuts.
I also had a close call that I witnessed.
December 10, 2012. I lived across from the Naval Air Station on the St. John’s River. Count 10 docks SW from the creek across the way, that’s us. [new owners as of 2018 tore down our old house and rebuilt a brand new one in its place-we moved out c. 1995.]
A thick fog blanketed the base, but it was clear on my side of the river.
Suddenly I see a P-3 Orion emerge from the fog bank.
At almost the exact same time I also see a Navy airliner do so as well, from the other runway.
The P-3 pilot saw the other guy first and suddenly banked VERY hard to the right to avoid the collision.
They must have missed each other by no more than 100 feet.
In ATC parlance that is called a “deal” I believe. I wonder what happened to that ground controller, if he spent the next month scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush, or was simply dishonorably discharged, or what. This being the Navy of course they would have been all hush-hush without the local media ever getting wind of it.
Agree about the nut-kicking, but I think this problem is now self-limiting.
Most people under age 40 have never experienced their car engine stalling. It’s a random failure that just doesn’t happen much anymore. Or is the result of lousy clutch / throttle coordination while driving a manual transmission. Another thing darn near no one (in the USA) under 40 has ever heard of much less driven.
So soon enough the general public won’t associate the word “stall” with an engine failure of anything, much less an airplane. And the aerodynamic naming problem will be solved. See … 
Good point, but…
A few weeks ago I gave a presentation involving basic aerodynamics to a group of college-aged kids. At one point I asked: “Let’s say we go to the local airport to take a ride in a Cessna 172, and I tell you during the flight I’m going to make the plane stall. What do you think is going to happen?”
Hands were raised and the kid I called on said, “The engine is going to stop.” No indication anyone else was planning to say something different. So… there’s still work to be done and I feel the historical crotch kicking is still justified. 
Let’s also note that this is still a common occurrence: A plane crashes as the result of a stall / spin and a local reporter goes to the airport for a statement. One of the local pilots or a manager says, “He stalled and crashed,” without giving further context. The reporter then goes back and writes that the engine quit, resulting in the accident. One could say the reporter is at fault here, but I blame the more knowledgeable pilots for not explaining a stall within an aviation context.
Very interesting details; thanks. That does look roughly like what he was trying to pull off.
Seems like a situation where there is only so much margin available. That margin might be used up by ambient conditions (high density altitude) or by bad luck (the plane tumbling in a weird way). And if X+Y>Z, you’re boned.
Sorry. At least I didn’t call it a barrel roll .
I would actually appreciate an explanation. And how to tell the difference, visually.
That applies to all of aviation (and a lot of the rest of life as well). In the case of airshow acrobatics, Z starts out as an especially small number.
That will certainly fuel the misogynist assholes. Which is a damned shame.
I also notice the picture of the backseater NFO is obsolete. She’s described as a Lieutenant Commander = LCDR = O-4, but in the pic her shoulder rank is O-3 = Lieutenant = LT. Now it might be obsolete by a week or by years; no way to know. I don’t know anything about current USN promotion rates, but back in my era, a 31yo O-4 would be very, very unusually young which suggests that LCDR Evans had not been an LCDR for long.
The frontseat pilot is shown wearing her current O-3 rank.
It wasn’t immediately obvious to me, but the article contains a slideshow of 12 pictures. None are informative about the mishap beyond what we can see in the two head shots in the first pic.
Damned shame to lose two good people and an irreplaceable expensive machine.
In an aileron roll you’re using (mostly) just the ailerons to roll the aircraft around the longitudinal axis.
A snap roll is essentially a horizontal spin. You abruptly pull back on the stick to rapidly increase the the wing’s angle of attack above the stall angle and apply rudder in the direction you want to roll. The rudder input causes the “inside” wing to stall and keeps the outside wing flying. The aircraft then autorotates. Recovery is basically opposite to the entry, opposite rudder and check forward to get the wing flying again.
Visually you can tell a snap roll because of the high nose attitude relative to the direction of travel, it’s yawing and rolling.
The only pilot I ever saw do a Lomcovák at an airshow was Art Scholl. In a sad coincidence, Scholl was killed while filming a scene for the original Top Gun.
Going to nit pick here. Both wings are stalled. But the inside wing is deeper into the stall with a higher angle of attack. Where the lift increases with angle of attack up to the stall, it decreases after the stall. This means there is more lift on the wing that has the lower angle of attack which then causes it to roll away from that wing.
Visual indication is correct. Easier to see with smoke, you can see that the plane is pointed away from the direction it is moving.
I’m not in a position to critique the routine but I’ve watched quite a few of them over the years. It didn’t appear as if he was trying to fly a set degree of snap rolls. and it seemed kinda low for the last maneuver so it may not have been planned. I fully expected a fireball or some evidence of fire and there wasn’t any. Not t. sure what to make of that.
Yeah fair enough.
There isn’t always a fire ball so I don’t think it’s meaningful data at this point.
There’s a different angle here without the plane blocking the view:
They censor the moment of impact, though. It does look like the right wing stalls, though it probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Afterward, there aren’t any thick clouds of black smoke, so I presume there wasn’t a whole lot of fuel in the plane. I’d guess they only fuel it up enough for one act, plus margin.
I watched Roush pancake a business jet trying to make runway 18 at Oshkosh. Cracked it like an egg. No massive fire. He stalled it close enough to the ground that he didn’t dig a wingtip in and cartwheel. So it’s no guarantee.
You don’t ad lib airshow routines. Just not done.
As noted, the details of how any given Lomcovák evolves is always a surprise, but that’s about as much variation as you want in an airshow routine.
He hit the ground at a pretty steep angle. He did not almoooost clear it. This was evidently not a matter of him starting the maneuver e.g. 100 feet too low versus the plan. Something went seriously awry during the maneuver leaving him in a very different position, orientation, and energy state than planned.
Which is why you won’t see a high speed airplane perform a snap roll. Not a WWII prop fighter, and certainly not a jet fighter / fighter-like trainer. They’re the exclusive province of low speed airplanes that can abruptly stall one or both wings and survive high yaw angles.
Sorry to triple-post. This comment belongs on the end of my post to @Magiver two posts above. …
Watching that latest vid that clearly shows the arrival angle to the ground and the right roll just before, I’m struck by there not being much acceleration of speed, nor evidence of a hard panic pull at the end. It is possible, just possible, that he fully or partially G-LOCced himself or whacked his head during all the flailing. And what minimal recovery maneuver we see was basically pitch trim, not active piloting. Maybe.
You can’t tell anything about engine RPM from any vid; the strobe effect ruins that bit of potential evidence. But another possibility is an engine failure, or him failing to add power during the recovery, again due to incapacitation. What I don’t see during the recovery phase is the usual sprightly acceleration of an Extra with the nose down and the throttle up.
Latest generation fighters can do much cooler stuff than a boring ol’ snap roll anyway.