Blue Angel down in Smyrna TN,

a reply to: Zaphod58

Sounds even more impressive with those big lumbering heavies doing it. Can't even imagine, honestly.

Still no preliminary word on the cause of crash? I haven't been able to find anything.

a reply to: Shamrock6

It'll be a few weeks. They're going to have to assemble the pieces as best they can, I think it had a data recorder now, so they'll have to analyze that... It probably won't be until the end of the month or close to it before they're saying anything.

Fat Albert with the 6 on the nose, as it departed to pick up Capt Kuss.



This Facebook page has video of them smoking the beach as they arrived.

www.facebook.com...

The SIB has thirty days to complete their report. They can get an extension if necessary, but that's the earliest we'll see an official report.

New video of the crash that raises more questions. He climbs vertically through the cloud deck, the camera follows #5 for a second them comes back to #6 as he comes vertically back below the clouds, looking like he's at least partially out of control.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Link?

a reply to: Bfirez

On YouTube under Blue Angels Crash Smyrna Tennessee 2016. Like his name, until it was official, I'm not going to post the moment he died.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Looks like he's in a hard roll the whole way down, no?

a reply to: Shamrock6

Yeah. I only watched it on my phone, but the reflections looked like he was going wing over wing the whole way down.

a reply to: Zaphod58

I just watched the video, gave me the chills.

a reply to: Zaphod58

What in the world would cause that? That makes me wonder about a stuck control surface again, but can that happen out of the blue?

What I'm trying to ask is can a surface get stuck at any time during flight or is it usually caught on the ground or what? Educate me, please.

ETA - would that also effect the ejection envelope?

a reply to: Shamrock6

To me it also seemed he was still throttle up! Not slowing down.

a reply to: Shamrock6

Flight control issues can develop any time they move. They run multiple checks prior to takeoff to try to catch any issues, but there's no guarantee that they will.

As for possible causes, flight control problems, GLOC, spatial disorientation could all have been involved.

The only things that really affect the ejection envelope are speed and altitude. Most seats are 0/0 (you can safely eject at 0 feet and 0 knots), but too fast and the wind blast will crush your chest. There was a pilot a few years ago that ejected in a dive, past mach one, and ended up with both shoulders dislocated, a broken arm, and other significant injuries.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Man that's crazy. Seats sure have come a hell of a long way from "try and slide the canopy back and avoid the tail on your way out" haven't they?

a reply to: Shamrock6


www.ejectionsite.com...

Oh yeah, they're a far cry from those days.

Ok this is getting ridiculous. The Russian display team lost an Su-27 and pilot earlier today, and now Patrouille Suisse just lost an F-5 practicing for an airshow in the Netherlands. Pilot got out OK. Pictures show most of his left horizontal stabilizer missing just before the crash.

After watching on my laptop, I'm going with power loss. I could see more detail now, and it looked like he may have been thinking about trying to come down the backside of a loop and go for the airport to try to put it down. Trade altitude for airspeed.

I'm still with his one engine ingesting a bird, causing a loss of power.

a reply to: JIMC5499

Either bird ingestion, or parts failure causing it, but I'll be willing to bet they go with engine failure during the climb.