I keep going back to this comment.
Are you insinuating that you can perform in an air show like this one, and not actually, physically attend the briefing, just be back-briefed by someone there?
If that’s true, I don’t know what to say.
Not insinuating - it's been discussed before on more than one forum. There was a bit of a brew-ha-ha not that long ago about that possibly happening at an egregious level when the VAC guys put a TBM into the water off of an airshow.
https://www.airshowstuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2788&start=40
Personally, I wouldn't get
too sanctimonious over it, especially if it's part of a formation, or, in some circumstances, there might be a separate briefing for a team, (although I certainly think that it could be abused - probably rarely - and the VAC deal doesn't seem to be primarily about the briefing, but some other ADM issues). An additional briefing is often true anyway, usually the flight leader will discuss more specifics, like who's in the lead, etc... and the military teams will attend the airboss briefing, but you know they have their own separate briefing where the meat of the matter is discussed. If you have a flight of 3 and the right wing guy gets his briefing from flight lead, that isn't really that dangerous, in my mind, as long as the lead pilot has given a thorough briefing on the important stuff and is comfortable having the newly briefed-pilot on his wing. He should've written it all down anyway.
There have also been situations where weather kept a plane, let's say a B-25, from arriving earlier in the week. It's on its way, say arriving at 9:30 before an 11am show - plenty of time to show the maintenance and pilot records, check in with the FAA, and get a briefing from flight lead, refuel, and be ready for the 1pm engine start. The difficulty being that the briefing is at 7am in the morning, which makes it impossible for the arriving pilot to be at the briefing. At a good show you probably get a packet that has a visual depiction of the important stuff related to show lines, altitudes, emergency procedures, schedule, and frequencies, etc... and if the plan is relatively simple, it's not really that complicated. When I flew in Wings Over Houston, we had our altitudes, ground points, procedures, what to do if you have an emergency, diversion point, etc. but flying the racetrack isn't hugely complicated, either. The bigger deal is not getting out of place, or off altitude. We were stacked in the L's and O's down at 300' and the T-6 and similar types were at 600' and the C-45 / Beech 18s were at 900 I believe. You could NOT climb into the stack above if you had an issue. It was interesting since the T-6s are faster than an L-5 and I could hear their engine / prop noise above my own engine every time they passed above.
Personally, I doubt that this particular issue was part of the WOD '22 accident chain. Tora lead / P-63 was at the briefing, so would have been Gunfighter and By Request's pilots, and the bombers were all already there from at least Thursday night and the weather was bad on Friday, so there likely wasn't any reason for them not to all be there Saturday morning.