Close one…
Pretty sure he broke airshow box limitations with that pass.
Wheels
No idea what I was seeing.
Why the low power setting? Why the nose low attitude? I need more context to know what’s going on here… but it looks awful!
Evidently one of the Solotürk display team, so it was a trained display pilot.
Looks like a roll, perhaps, or at least recovering from inverted?
Why the low RPM, I don’t know? Hard to tell what kind of thrust setting it had, but it sounds like it’s revving up as it passes.
What you can’t see on this video clearly due to low quality is that before he pulled up he was doing a roll.
Here’s the same situation from another angle.
Really unresponsible.
Oh damn, now I see the danger those people were put in. FFS.
Perfect example of how to get your flight status revoked.
How did a wing wag turn into an overbank into a near inverted pull…and that roll probaly made it worse. Safer recovery from left overbank would have been right wings level and pull, wouldn’t it? Or was the roll supposed to be part of the routine?
My guess is that he had something in particular in mind when he rolled but realized he was far too low to do whatever that was and rolled positive and pulled. I does demonstrate how totally defenseless you are as an airshow spectator.
German aviation magazine “Flugrevue” is speculating, that it might have been a FLCS malfunction.
Hmm. That makes no sense to me. It never looked OUT of control. It just looked POORLY controlled.
As much as i personally bloody hate the ridiculous rules we have for airshow safety in the uk after the shoreham crash.
It does make stuff like this very difficult to happen.
Agreed. Misjudged it i think
Hmm… do we count the biological input device as part of the FLCS?
Mover’s video suggests it’s an older F-16 with the analog FLCS, but the excursion seems to be in roll only - my understanding is the F-16 is unstable in pitch, and though the second video isn’t great there doesn’t seem to be an uncommanded bunt or anything as part of the sequence that would make the roll worse. It doesn’t even look like the pilot is abusing the limiters on that pass (up until the pullup at the end of the roll, at least).
But I guess we’ll find out sooner or later?
Uh…what? Not everything requires analysis. The dude screwed up and very quickly recovered.
I’m lost on how doing a roll was faster/more efficient. It looks like he got into about 135 degrees of overbank (measuring lift vector angle with 0/360 at the top), and paused for a split second in overbank, so there wouldn’t have been any roll inertia. Rolling the 135 degrees back upright would have been faster and lost less altitude than doing a 225 degree roll the opposite direction if thinking logically. Is there something aerodynamically that counters this logic?
I believe the thinking is, you have to recognise the overbank, arrest the left rolling motion, roll right to upright and then pull up.
If it was a roll coupling excursion, which seems to be what Mover thinks, arresting the initial roll would probably be slower than letting it go through (edit: because forward stick to keep away from the ground probably increases the roll rate and makes recovery efforts less effective) - and then the back stick on pull up will slow the roll as well once you’re the right way up…
Disclaimer: I do this on PC sims, not in reality.
Quickest way out of a roll is to continue.
Inertia, if you are rolling left, it takes time (albeit milliseconds) for deflection and the aircraft to overcome it’s current inertia and reverse direction.
Continuing that left roll likely was the main factor that kept the aircraft from impacting the ground.
Considering the altitude that control was re-acquired for pull out, that milliseconds it would have took to overcome the left roll inertia and bring it back around, that plane would have hit the ground.
it LOOKS like loss of spatial awareness,
He came out of that pass and was likely aiming to left bank exiting the show line to the right,
Problem was, during said left bank, he over rotated and pulled, pointing his nose at the ground, so he finished the roll and pulled out.
There needs to be reference to the videos, what part of the demo was this pass,
I would even ask if the demo continued, but even sans an aircraft malfunction, in the US of A, that would be an automatic KIO and suspend operations.