Happened just a few hours ago, near where I live:
http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/local/wing-walkers-plane-crashes-at-dayton-air-show/nYSBY/
Video (warning - graphic):
To watch the pre event interview with her where she seems so happy and confident - then to see how it all ends in less than a second. What a crazy juxtaposition. How sad
Horrific and sad.
To the SDMB pilots… what is your best guess at the cause of this tragedy? Loss of control due to mechanical failure? Wind shear? Pilot error?
Looked like too low and too slow, to me, but I’m not a pilot.
Tragic. 
There’s some small comfort in the knowledge that, unlike in other plane crashes, the victims didn’t have time to fear their impending death.
The guy who taught me aerobatics is now a fairly big name on the airshow circuit, and every time I see a headline about this type of incident I hope to hell it wasn’t him. And it was not in this case, which is small comfort. This sort of thing is terrible.
Having said that… I hate airshows.
I love aerobatics, I love skillful flying, but I hate hate HATE the way we do airshows. Why? Because we insist on everything being down to ground level. New airshow performers go through a period of experience where they spend time at higher altitudes. Their first year on the circuit they have to stay at or above a certain altitude (I think they start them at 500’), then lower the following year, and eventually they get the FAA waiver for ground level.
Watching a new performer work at 500’ is fine. You can see it perfectly well and the pilot is provided a margin of error. I’d rather all airshows were done that way. This is actually similar to circus. American circuses tend to go for danger - a guy walking across a high wire with no safety devices. Whereas in European circuses you’re more likely to see a wire walker with safety harnesses (or just down low) doing a backflip on the wire and a more skill-based performance in general*.
That’s what I’d like to see at airshows. Maybe the very same acts, no changes in repertoire, but performed higher. I don’t know if the aircraft today could have recovered with a 500’ buffer, but I have no doubt such a policy would prevent some of these tragedies.
- Ironically, European airshows have far less restrictive safety rules. There have been a number of crashes that involved terrible spectator deaths; comparable accidents in the U.S. are very unlikely because of rules for where spectators can be during the show.
In the interview, the reporters were asking her about how she handles adverse weather conditions. She answered that they try their best to be safe by being fully briefed and informed of weather conditions right before they take off so they can perform as safely as possible.
During the performance, shortly before the crash, you can hear the announcer discussing wind conditions and about how the pilot compensates. This makes me wonder if the comments from the reporters the day before weren’t just casual questions, but instead if they knew that the weather today was expected to be windy and risky.
Given that, when a plane is flying close to stall speed sudden changes in wind speed, a head wind suddenly drops, or a tail wind develops could tip the balance and cause a stall. To me that’s what it looks like here - the plane suddenly lost lift and her wing, having her full weight on top, dipped.
Brutal. I don’t see how she could survive that.
Looks like a sudden failure of some component.
The amount of information that can be gleaned from the video is limited, but to me it looks like neither wind shear nor mechanical failure. It looks like a sudden control input of the wrong sort. In other words: pilot error. That sort of flying leaves little margin for error and if you aren’t perfect you’re likely dead.
Of course, subject to change with the receipt of more information.
Third Law of Piloting: Thou Shalt Maintain Thy Airspeed, Lest the Ground Reach Up and Smite Thee.
Too low, too slow = no lift.
A sobering sight.
If it was a stall I doubt that the wind was a major factor. For a gust to make the difference between stalling and flying you’d have to be very very close to the stall to start with and there’s no reason to be flying that slowly when doing aerobatics, particularly an inverted fly past. Still, it does kind of look like he runs out of roll authority as they get close to inverted. I wonder how hot it was? High temperatures and low atmospheric pressure degrades the performance of engines and wings.
It would be a lot easier to tell what had happened if we knew what was supposed to happen (ie is it supposed to be a short period of inverted flight followed by a right roll to recover as we saw or was that an unsuccessful escape manoeuvre?)
There is a puff of white smoke from the engine is they are rolling inverted to start with, but that could just be a transient as the oil system transfers from upright to inverted. If they had an engine failure, that would certainly cause the sort of problem they ended up with. It sounds like the engine was developing power up until impact though.
I don’t really see anything that strongly suggests a mechanical failure, it all just doesn’t look quite right from the time they start to roll inverted, descending flight path, very slow roll rate, and then the pilot decides to get out of it but doesn’t have the height to do it.
Unfortunately most airshow accidents are either outright pilot error or pilot error in response to a failure. Hell, even accidents caused purely by mechanical failure can still be partially blamed on the pilot for not having an escape option. The only exception would be something catastrophic like structural failure of the wings.
I wonder just how much margin for error they have in their routine? I’ve flown a biplane with a wing-walker before and the aeroplane was a real dog. It was underpowered to start with and the wing-walker wasn’t wearing a skin suit so there’s a lot of drag, we struggled to climb to 500 feet and do a circuit and landing. There’s no way the combination of aeroplane and wing-walker that I flew could have done aerobatics. They have a more power aeroplane, the wing-walker is small and wears a skin suit, so they have far better capability than we had, but are they having to use nearly all of that capability to fly their routine? Have they been close to this kind of disaster many times in the past but just never realised it?
I’m horrified.
Yes, they both died doing what they loved doing… but they died Horribly and knew that they would for 5 full seconds before they did. I’m ashamed of myself that I clicked that link.
[WaldoPepper]"…damn vultures…" [/WaldoPepper]
I count more like 2 seconds, and although it’s horrific to bystanders, the deaths were probably instant.
I guess what I’m curious about is if the final roll was intentional. That is, was it part of the routine to de-invert at that point, but there wasn’t enough control authority/airspeed/altitude/etc. to accomplish that; or was the roll unintentional from the beginning (pilot/mechanical error, etc.)?
It didn’t look like a stall to me. Granted, stalls can be very sedate, gentle things but Stearman bipes aren’t known for their gentle stall characteristics. Not impossible, but the angle we see the plane in the video, from the front, can make for deceptive perception of speed. I’d like to see some video from the side for comparison.
Actually, the fact I’ve flown a Stearman sort of works against me here, in that I know just enough to really screw up my speculation. The Stearman I flew was a former airshow plane that used to fly a wingwalker much as the accident plane, with an inverted flight oil system and plenty of power. I wouldn’t describe it as a “dog” though it certainly had drag. On the other hand, I am not an aerobatic pilot and I flew that airplane in a very conservative (a.k.a. timid) manner.
A brief puff of white smoke was most likely a bit of leaked oil hitting something hot on the engine - and a fine spray of oil blowing back from the engine on those things is hardly unusual. I don’t think it was significant (with usual caveat about more information leading to a change of opinion).
Such an airplane should be able to fly inverted for considerable time with no problem. Rolling is the usual means to un-invert. What strikes me as unusual is not the roll so much as the loss of altitude in the roll, which might have been a stall but could simply have been a slight error in the pitch of the plane, resulting in a descent where level flight was desired.
Aerobatic flight that low is always on the edge of disaster, there is simply little or no margin for error.
I will say, however, that if they DID stall then yes, her weight on the wing probably explains why that side hit first, a wing makes a nice lever.
That’s really sad. I went to look at Their wedding website and it mentions that apparently she has teenage kids. 
I feel very bad for her fiance and her kids.
I don’t know much about flying, but my impression has always been that there are an awful lot of airshow accidents.
I guess what I’m interested in is whether that particular roll was an escape manoeuvre roll because he realised things weren’t right, or was that the standard recovery roll gone wrong? That’s assuming the roll was intentional. A video of their normal routine would be helpful.
Edit: I’ve found this video of their normal routine. Their inverted flypast is very different from the one on the accident flight. For one they stay inverted for a long time and they continue rolling left to recover. The manoeuvre also looks a lot more precise and defined than on the accident flight. The angle of the videos doesn’t help but my impression is that on the accident flight the pilot doesn’t get the nose of the aircraft up nearly as high as usual prior to rolling inverted and that the roll control seems mushy as they get inverted (could be due to performance issues, or hesitation from the pilot if he’s unsure of how things are going.) It looks to me like they don’t quite get fully inverted before what looks like an intentional escape manoeuvre with insufficient height to recover.
That’s an educated guess as to what happened, but the important part is knowing why it happened and I’ve got no idea.
Something else I’m interested in is whether she clips in to the seated position on the wing. It would give an insight into what sort of level of real risk (as compared to crowd perceived risk) they were willing to take.
There should always been an out. At the very least you should be able to suffer an engine failure at any part of the routine and be able to recover to a landing. I realise that there are some routines where this is not done. In particular some pilots of very high powered aerobatic machines that use their power to fly extreme angles of pitch at very slow airspeeds and low altitudes are very reliant on the engine at that point. I don’t know that a wing-walker routine should be in that category though.
Note that although I’ve mentioned engine failure a couple of times, I don’t think that’s what happened here. The engine certainly sounds like it was developing power throughout.
I think the smoke is probably just a few puffs from the display smoke system that probably doesn’t work properly while inverted.
At that low altitude, yes. Not when you have a height buffer, which is why I made my plea for higher altitudes at airshows. I’ve screwed up during aerobatics, but was always high enough that I had room to escape. Those escapes are part of acro training. The guys I know on the airshow circuit have told me the desire to do their routines as low as possible is frequently a factor in fatalities. They figure the lower the better, for the audience. Me - I’d rather see a skillful display of flying without so much danger up at 500’.
Anyway, the video looks like a stall / spin entry to me. I’ve done inverted stalls, and that’s exactly what they look like when not properly coordinated.
Comparing the successful routine vs. the crash it does look like they were performing inverted flight higher on the successful one. It may be the pilot simply got too low, perhaps he attempted an early exit, but it was a case of going from bad to worse.
Could be, but then the question becomes “what were they doing flying so close to the stall?” There’s no reason to be flying that slowly. From the commentary on the video of a successful routine their normal entry speed prior to rolling inverted is 150 mph. That should be heaps of speed to do what they were doing. If they were slower, why?
On the subject of ground level aerobatics, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with that provided you follow some very simple energy management rules. If you are slow, be high, if you are going to be low then be fast. If you are doing vertical recovery to ground level such as ground level loops then do the majority of the high g recovery while you are still up high such that the bottom part of the loop is simply flying back down to ground level in a controlled way. You can do that in high performance aeroplanes but not so much in low performance ones.