The root cause is well understood, i.e. the pilot did not climb high enough before commencing the split-S maneuver. From my armchair location I can’t possibly fault the pilot for bailing out when he did, but I wonder if it would have been theoretically possible to save the aircraft if he had stayed in it. Was he already at the max G for that air speed? Would the aircraft have followed a tighter loop than it did after the point of actual bailout if he had remained in the cockpit, pulling back on the stick?
The actual root cause was a miscomputation of altitude by TBird 6.
MSL (Mean Sea Level) altitude is the height above sea level. AGL (Above Ground Level) altitude is height above… you guessed it, the ground.
At the time of the mishap, the TBirds had to convert AGL altitudes provided by airshow officials into MSL altitudes, for every one of their maneuvers, at every airshow location they performed. This worked fine for them for years… until the one time it didn’t. As a result, part of the TBirds “contract” with airshow officials now requires that all altitudes are provided in MSL.
An excellent nitpick over the meaning of “root cause,” but it doesn’t really answer the question.
Maybe this discussion belongs in IMHO, since it’ll be a matter of conjecture from experienced pilots, but the question remains thus: could the crash have been prevented if the pilot had remained in the cockpit?
He doesn’t bang out until he is very low and you can be sure that up until the time he decides to go he would have been pulling maximum g for maximum change in direction. At the time he ejects the fuselage is only just level with the ground but the aircraft trajectory would still have been a good 20º down (I’m guessing a bit here, but the point is the downward trajectory is significant.)
Check out this Su-30 crash. See how the jet has its nose very high but is still loosing altitude? The Thunderbird F-16 pilot was in a similar situation and still had a lot of pulling to do and not a lot of space to do it in.
Not a pilot, but I think the relevant technical question is “how much sink rate did the aircraft have at the moment the pilot departed, and how much altitude would it have required to counter it and resume straight-and-level flight?”
Looking at how hard the plane pancaked, I’d guess the sink rate was sufficient that the A/C would have required more than 100 feet more AGL.
The pilot did all he could, but that pooch was irretrievably screwed.
I don’t have info on the specific details of the accident, but here’s a couple general tidbits:
That’s a very good bet bordering on certainty. The central innovation of the F-16 was the computerized fly-by-wire system that meant getting the tightest fastest possible turn was as simple as pulling back on he stick to the physical stop.
The one thing he could have influenced (a bit) was the speed. Historically fighters have a concept called corner velocity (V[sub]c[/sub]), which is the speed for best turning. Either faster or slower results in a larger turn radius. With the advent of the F-16 that changed a bit where now over a fairly wide range of the true optimum, say +/-30 knots, there wasn’t really a material difference in turn radius.
As a practical matter, the time interval from him recognizing the problem to his jumping out was short enough that he could not have deliberately changed speed enough to make a large difference.
Equally clearly, if his actual speed would have hit the ground by, say, just 6 inches, then it’s quite likely that had he done things just slightly more optimally he’d have cleared the ground.
As soon as he took his hand off the stick to pull the eject handle the flight controls would have quickly relaxed back to 1G. So yes, from probably 1/10th of a second before you see the canopy start to separate until ground impact the airplane was rapidly transitioning from the tightest possible pull-out to 1G = very slightly upward-curving flight.
Putting these two factors together as a semi-informed observer I conclude FWIW:
It’s *logically *possible the mishap was still avertable at his moment of recognition. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t; we here don’t have the detailed data to know. But the range of logical possibilities might have included a very, very close call rather than a hull loss accident.
The mishap wasn’t practically avertable from that point. He was already cutting it real fine and decided as his recovery attempt was still developing that it wasn’t going to be enough. So he (rightly) bailed on it.
Every pilot has ultimate responsibility for determining safe altitudes. Even more so for aerobatic pilots, who have to do it for every maneuver with a vertical component. The Thunderbirds, Blue Angels, and all other high-performance flight demo teams have to calculate safe altitudes for EVERY maneuver, for every show. In the case of the TBirds, making the conversion from AGL to MSL at each different show location worked for a long time… until the one time it didn’t, which contributed to a hull loss.
Rather than turning the job over to airshow organizers, I’d say the correct response would be to do a better job in future: have more than one person do the conversion, cross check all converted altitudes, etc.
Radar/radio altimeter does this. You’d have to have it pointing in all directions to work during aerobatics though, they typically just point in a narrow arc from the bottom. Simpler to just use the normal altimeter. If you want height above the aerodrome you can set it to zero before you take-off. It would seem the Thunderbirds don’t do this though.