These sorts of formation “maneuvers” are EXTREMELY dynamic. That’s what the top level causal factor was. My only surprise with the report is the deliberate removal of qualification by the pilots as a causal factor. I believe they were not qualified or trained for this sort of maneuvering. It puts them in the they didn’t know what they didn’t know arena.
Personally, that statement seems like complete baloney, even despite the fact that the accident happened.
First off, at every show I've been to, the individual formations or groups of pilots DO brief after the main briefing. The bomber pilots would have briefed and the fighter formation would have briefed. There was no expectation or intention that the two formations would have merged, so they wouldn't have briefed it together. I've even done that in an L-5 at Wings Over Houston. We went off into a separate location after the main briefing and discussed our speeds, positions, spacing, emergency options, etc.
Second, there was nothing about the B-17's flight path that indicates that the pilots weren't qualified, or that they weren't flying the correct line as they were told, so I think it's reasonable that should take them OUT of the equation.
That eliminates all but Craig, the P-63 pilot, and makes it seem like he is the target of your statement. Examining that, he had been a long-time Tora Tora Tora member, and even flew the Hawk in the display just before the show. He knew the flight lines, had also practiced and had the FAA approval to fly an acro routine in the Kingcobra, and had no trouble with collision avoidance during the carefully rehearsed and choreographed Tora display, and was even doing tail-chase maneuvers with the "Zero" ahead. The accident maneuver should have been spectacularly easier than the TORA show if it hadn't been for the airboss' timing issues - which you really can't blame on the last man in trail. If anything, (
and I'm NOT making an accusation here) one might say that the lead fighter (who has managed to avoid much discussion, but I believe that he IS a former military pilot and IP and probably "qualified" by your standards)
might be somewhat more responsible for the separation of his flight from the other flight... which is something I haven't really seen at all addressed. But they all had an expectation bias that the timing of the airboss' calls for their turns would be good like it had been every time before. That's why I think that the most obvious causal factor on the pilots' side of the accident was complacency and perhaps invulnerability.
But you bring up an interesting point. The faa requires that formations BRIEF. They had NOT briefed this situation. Granted they were being “controlled”.
I mean, if the standard for formation briefings is that you have to brief every single possible situation that could arise, then most formation flights are illegal. The FAA standard in the regs for what you brief for a formation doesn't seem to be quite that strict. All it says is:
§ 91.111 Operating near other
aircraft.
(a) No
person may operate an
aircraft so close to another
aircraft as to create a collision hazard.
(b) No
person may operate an
aircraft in formation flight except by arrangement with the
pilot in command of each
aircraft in the formation.
(c) No
person may operate an
aircraft, carrying passengers for hire, in formation flight.
The previous years I had been CAF Redbird Squadron OPS officer, and had been tasked with getting their Taylorcraft L-2 back in the air and I spent a reasonable amount of time over at HQ the year before the accident making sure the annual got done, getting her airworthy and had had a lot of the kind of conversations and such that happen when you are standing around the aircraft in the hangar. The folks at HQ were trying very, very hard to finish the year without an accident, and making real safety culture efforts. The atmosphere at HQ even had a bit of a sense of hopeful relief in the air after Wings Over Houston had finished. It looked like it was going to be a year without a single major CAF incident and the the expectation was that a minimal acro show with a high emphasis on simple flybys and "safe" flying (
one of the things that was notable about the WoD show was that they really were making a concerted effort to keep it low-energy and avoid offending the nearby neighborhoods) would be a wrap on a perfect year. That ended up being a recipe for disaster in the simplest of mistakes, vectoring the two formations into the same space with a ridiculous amount of space available (long gaps between passes for the crowd) and fewer planes being vectored than in previous years.
