Snowbird down

Reports of an ejection and pilot in helmet seen on a residential roof (haven’t heard if upright but sounded like not) with people rendering aid.
 
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I saw a video that appears to show a medium rate turn at a near 90° bank angle, then an apparent high AOA stall and spin. The aircraft was about 2,000' AGL.

There are then two big bangs and white smoke trails as the aircraft rotates toward the ground. I guess these are the ejection seats being fired, but I'm used to seeing rocket motors power ejection seats, not an explosive round. I don't think they are compressor stalls.

One occupant landed on a roof and was transported to a hospital, the other person was killed.
 
Flame out at low altitude? Bird Strike? What does this button do if I push it? Oh. crap that was the EJECT button!
 
Crud. Best wishes for a full recovery for the pilot and co-pilot. Glad no ground injuries were sustained.
 
There is video of the event out there. The accident aircraft was the wingman during a section takeoff. He made an abrupt pull-up from his lead.

This is purely my speculation. Engine failure at low level. Attempted a pull up to trade airspeed for altitude and make the 180 to the field. Instead stalled it in the turn and punched out.

Haven't seen confirmation on the outcome for the crew or people on the ground. Hopefully all are ok and only loss is the aircraft.
 
midwestpa24 said:
There is video of the event out there. The accident aircraft was the wingman during a section takeoff. He made an abrupt pull-up from his lead.

This is purely my speculation. Engine failure at low level. Attempted a pull up to trade airspeed for altitude and make the 180 to the field. Instead stalled it in the turn and punched out.

Haven't seen confirmation on the outcome for the crew or people on the ground. Hopefully all are ok and only loss is the aircraft.
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Per an earlier post, passenger was killed, pilot is hospitalized.
 
I was waiting for something official, but the Snowbirds just confirmed it. RIP
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I assume they fly with a maintenance tech when in remote locations... Sad day for military aviation...prayer for all involved.
 
Sad.

I really shouldn’t point this out but Snowbirds SOP at airshows was if a jet broke, that pilot landed and grabbed the spare jet, and quite often rejoined during the show.

Those poor airplanes are ancient.

I love their show. Much more graceful and slow than the jet teams flying anything closer to modern, and their people are top notch.

But to have a regular bail out to go get the spare jet (even happened at their most recent OSH appearance), says something about needing some newer, or simply, more reliable equipment.

Very sad to hear about the injuries and the fatality. Not trying to take away from that tragedy.
 
denverpilot said:
Sad.

I really shouldn’t point this out but Snowbirds SOP at airshows was if a jet broke, that pilot landed and grabbed the spare jet, and quite often rejoined during the show.

Those poor airplanes are ancient.
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I'm guessing they are in for a stand down. They lost an airplane here (Atlanta) in October of 19. Losing two aircraft in 8 months isn't good.
 
3393RP said:
I saw a video that appears to show a medium rate turn at a near 90° bank angle, then an apparent high AOA stall and spin. The aircraft was about 2,000' AGL.
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Looked like 1000' AGL to me, maybe just a little more. I learned to fly there 47 years ago. The airplane crashed about two blocks from where we lived for almost four years up until three years ago. I worked at the airport. Was living elsewhere for 20 years before that.
 
midwestpa24 said:
There is video of the event out there. The accident aircraft was the wingman during a section takeoff. He made an abrupt pull-up from his lead.

This is purely my speculation. Engine failure at low level. Attempted a pull up to trade airspeed for altitude and make the 180 to the field. Instead stalled it in the turn and punched out.

Haven't seen confirmation on the outcome for the crew or people on the ground. Hopefully all are ok and only loss is the aircraft.
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This was my thought as well. Hard to really tell from the audio, but that maneuver would be consistent with trying to intercept some portion of a flameout approach profile. And/or optimize oneself in the ejection envelope.
 
denverpilot said:
I love their show. Much more graceful and slow than the jet teams flying anything closer to modern, and their people are top notch.
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I have a couple friends who ended up doing ride alongs with them. Both remarked that those guys had a real unusual finesse with energy management, I'd imagine a necessity when doing this type of flying in a (comparably) low thrust jet. One of said friends was a an opposing solo in the Blues at the time, so I am willing to take his word for it. They both had great things to say about all the guys and gals who hosted/flew them. Sorry to hear this.
 
Sad to hear.

The Snowbirds used to come into Gallup once a year for fuel. They always did their colorful smoke arrival, and we always got calls from folks saying they saw an airplane on fire...
 
kyleb said:
But wouldn't you punch before you were in a steep bank with the nose down?
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Depends on my airspeed/altitude. I have no familiarity with this particular aircraft so to be honest, unknown. If the airplane departed controlled flight, you bet I would be pulling the handle if I were that (apparently) low. I'd also imagine that the Tudor's seats have a smaller "envelope" for success compared to more modern aircraft. Sometimes the window for making that decision is very short. Low level engine out or out of control flight are both pretty unforgiving regimes for airplanes.
 
It'll be interesting to hear about the seats. Apparently the stock seats on these dinosaurs had a problem with man-seat separation. They're not zero zero seats anyways, so they're already at a disadvantage with the sink rate they had, based on the video. Every jet jockey since 1950 knows about "zoom and boom". You gotta get out "before stall or sink rate develops", and that's straight out of the tech orders from these things. The video doesn't even show a single chute canopy. The occupants likely fell ballistic to the ground, maybe a partial canopy acted as a drogue and managed to allow the pilot to survive the impact. Clearly didn't work out for the second occupant.

Biggest reason I don't miss the BUFF is the seat. Ditto for the -38 pre-Martin Baker. Those things were placebo. I got lucky in pilot training. I never had a clue how crappy a seat I was flying on as a 38 student.
 
As others have posted, the Canadair CT-114 Tutor is an old airplane. Delivered to the Forces in the early 1960s. It was replaced as the primary jet trainer about 20 years ago. The Snowbirds are the only operational squadron left in the RCAF that use it. The ejection system doesn't compare with what modern trainers and fighters can do.

There have been ejections out of the airplane where they didn't clear the T-tail. This one looks like the pilot tried to get the necessary altitude and got the jet upright for the ejection, but still too low for full chute deployment.
 
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hindsight2020 said:
I never had a clue how crappy a seat I was flying on as a 38 student.
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I’m guessing by this statement you didn’t fly the T-37 in UPT. The old 38 seat was heaven sent after being in a Tweet. I had 1,500+ hours sitting in that seat that had nothing more than a glorified shotgun shell to get me out.

I used to joke that when you pulled the handle and squeezed the triggers you’d hear all of “Pop Goes the Weasel” before a giant spring launched you out of the jet (maybe).
 
I've now seen a better video than the first one I viewed.

The aircraft may have suffered a catastrophic engine failure, and the pilot intended to trade airspeed for altitude as he started a turn back towards the runway. Unfortunately, it appears he was too aggressive in the zoom climb and steep bank, and the aircraft stalled and spun.

After the plane stalled and went into a spin, the pilot recovered control and rolled out with the wings level. You can see the positive control as he stops the spin.

Almost simultaneously, the ejection sequence is activated, and both occupants leave the aircraft. Unfortunately, the ejection seat wasn't the zero-zero type that can be pulled at zero altitude and zero forward speed and still deliver sufficient height for a safe outcome. Those type seats have steerable solid rocket boosters with gyroscopic controls. They automatically point the seat to vertical flight, and the rocket motor increases the seat altitude enough to allow a successful parachute deployment even if the aircraft is stationary on a runway.

Instead, the older generation seat in the CT-114 fires an explosive round to separate it from the aircraft (the sound is obvious in the video), and the trajectory is fixed. It pushes the seat almost straight up from the fuselage centerline.

At the moment of ejection, the aircraft was in a high speed steep dive approaching the ground, and as a result the seats were propelled almost horizontally with a significant downward vector. There was not enough time to get a good canopy, and both of the crew hit hard.
 
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Groundpounder said:
The person that was killed was the teams public affairs officer, Jenn Casey. The pilot has serious but non life threatening injuries.

https://airshowstuff.com/v4/2020/snowbird-officer-killed-in-crash-identified-as-captain-jenn-casey/

I am afraid between this crash and the one last year, this may be the end of the Snowbirds. Canadians don't have much of an appetite for adversity, so they will probably just disband the team vs try to fix the issues.
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Agreed. This may be the end. Losses like this for a precision aerobatic team is unacceptable. They need to retire those old trainers and either find a new airframe or stand down indefinitely.
 
Geosync said:
Agreed. This may be the end. Losses like this for a precision aerobatic team is unacceptable. They need to retire those old trainers and either find a new airframe or stand down indefinitely.
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Canadian Defense is still flying first gen F-18As. They will eventually have to replace them with newer fighters, perhaps F-35s. Then they will have a good supply of F18as to use as the new Snowbirds.
 
They've had a few other accidents in the last few decades, last year's was kind of a yawner. I really like their show, it actually lets you see something rather than the wham-bam nature of the T-Birds or the Blues.

The pilots were the nicest bunch. I've flown with one of them. OK, we had to do it in the Navion (we had another Snowbird in a friend's Navion and we flew formation). Here's Me and Margy in a Tudor with "Naughty"...

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Margy and I had pointed out to Sticky and Naughty when the came to Udvar-Hazy that their planes were old enough to park in Vintage at Oshkosh. We couldn't get all of them, but for two years we got one of them. The EAA threw in camping gear (and a case of local brews, they are Canadian after all).

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When I had my Navion off-field landing, I had to total up my log book (which I'd not done since I passed my instrument checkride over a decade earlier). I found that I crossed the 1000 hour mark while flying with Naughty in the Navion here. The Snowbird guys had an Oshkosh bucket list, one of which was flying the Ripon approach. We let them practice one landing at an outlying airport and then made them fly the Navions back to the show. They also wanted to drive one of the VW bugs the various chairman are issued at the show, so I went and borrowed one from the Vintage flight line chairs and we let the Canadians drive it around the show line.
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I got a Snowbirds challenge coin from that. It's one of my prized aviation posessions.
 
Pascal Forget said:
Canadian Defense is still flying first gen F-18As. They will eventually have to replace them with newer fighters, perhaps F-35s. Then they will have a good supply of F18as to use as the new Snowbirds.
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I'd kind of wondered if they stuck with the Tutor because the Blues were already flying the Americano version of the CF-18. Then again, the Tbirds and Blues both flew the F-4 for a period of time, so maybe it isn't a big deal.
 
Given the fact that this was a flight of two and the right seater was a PR person, this must have been a DD. The Snowbirds have 12 planes. Nine are regular performance planes, one's for the commander, and two are the advance men and PA announcers. The regular show planes are 1-9. The two advance guys are 10 and 11 (the "double digits") and the commander's plane is 12. That's 12 we're sitting in above since it was the only one that had the ejection seats safetied off at the time we were there. The DD planes do get pressed into hot service from time to time. If you watched their first show at Oshkosh you'll note that 5 temporarily left the formation early on due to mechanical problems and the pilot grabbed one of the DD ships to rejoin the act.

Since these are all two seaters, the various crew chiefs and other people ride along with the pilots. These planes are modified to allow the PIC to optionally sit on the right. Dpeending on your position in the formation, you may be flying from that side.
 
3393RP said:
Unfortunately, the ejection seat wasn't the zero-zero type that can be pulled at zero altitude and zero forward speed and still deliver sufficient height for a safe outcome. Those type seats have steerable solid rocket boosters with gyroscopic controls. They automatically point the seat to vertical flight, and the rocket motor increases the seat altitude enough to allow a successful parachute deployment even if the aircraft is stationary on a runway.

Instead, the older generation seat in the CT-114 fires an explosive round to separate it from the aircraft (the sound is obvious in the video), and the trajectory is fixed. It pushes the seat almost straight up from the fuselage centerline.

At the moment of ejection, the aircraft was in a high speed steep dive approaching the ground, and as a result the seats were propelled almost horizontally with a significant downward vector. There was not enough time to get a good canopy, and both of the crew hit hard.
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Just so people have realistic understanding end expectations, even 0/0 seats like the ACES II don't perform well when ejection is initiated with a sink rate. The Weber seats in the Tutor are out of the ejection envelope at pattern-type altitudes (1000' and under) as soon as any sink rate develops.
 
35 AoA said:
I'd kind of wondered if they stuck with the Tutor because the Blues were already flying the Americano version of the CF-18. Then again, the Tbirds and Blues both flew the F-4 for a period of time, so maybe it isn't a big deal.
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A few years ago the Snowbirds had looked at moving to F-18s. They decided not to because of operating costs. They would have to cut the number of appearances and aircraft.
 
midwestpa24 said:
A few years ago the Snowbirds had looked at moving to F-18s. They decided not to because of operating costs. They would have to cut the number of appearances and aircraft.
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Yep, and they'd have needed to add a support aircraft of some sort. They lug crews and spares around in the Tudors now.
 
Several witnesses, including an old jet jock, heard a pop just before the airplane climbed and turned. Compressor stall, maybe, and the military is even speculating openly about that. Birdstrike perhaps, but there are also other causes for compressor stalls. I'm thinking he was trying to aim the airplane at the hillside north of the residential area but got a little slow in the turn. The hillside was nearly a mile away from where he started the turn. Would have been marginal, maybe? No idea what the glide of a Tutor might be.
 
Not my words, but from another forum....

A few points of clarification from a guy with 1600 hours on the Tutor (not Tudor, for the record):

- although the airframes are getting close to 60 years old, the engines are not. They have a TBO and service life they did when they were first introduced (those figures I am not sure of). These engines are likely still in production as it is the same basic engine (GE J85) that is used by the USAF and their fleet of 500+ T38 Talon fleet. The Tutor is the J85-Can 85 while the T38's is a J85 - 5A version.

- ejection is all about physics and the aircraft vector when ejection is initiated. The seat has the same inertial characteristic as the aircraft hosting it - the velocity vector is downward, so is the seat; if the aircraft is in a steep, nose-down attitude, so this the seat and if the aircraft is banked so is the seat. With a gimballed seat, there is some assistance provided by the rockets as the will aid in changing the ejection path; notice in that CF18 video how he went out of the aircraft in a 90 degree bank and the rockets maneuvered to provide a slight vertical upward component.

- the idea with an engine failure in single engine military jets is to exchange airspeed for altitude to get away from the ground, buy some time to sort things out and assess whether one can return to the same runway. The idea in the Tutor is to apex at 130 kts (above the stall speed) and assess if one can get to a downwind position abeam the threshold of the take-off runway at or above 1500 ft agl; this is known as "low-key". If you can't achieve that then the idea is to jump out.

I do not wish to debate whether the engines are good or bad or whether decisions were right or wrong but simply provide facts on this forum. I will say, however, that the Tutor jet is perfectly safe even at its ripe old age; engine failures with this aircraft, like any military jet aircraft, have occurred from their introduction in the 1960's and throughout their history. This engine failure occurred at the worst possible time, shortly after take-off before the aircraft could achieve lots of energy (potential, i.e. altitude, and kinetic, i.e. airspeed).

This is a terrible tragedy wherein a goodwill tour turned tragic in the blink-of-an-eye. My hope and prayer is that they get to the bottom of what happened, adjust as necessary and continue the Snowbirds with the Tutor aircraft.
 
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