RENO, Nev. Experts don’t know what happened in the air last weekend in Reno that killed two race pilots.
Both of the pilots who won first and second place at the National Air Race Championships on Sunday crashed. Experts say it could have been because of a blind spot in the plane, glare from the sun, or even a momentary loss of focus.
But many people are shocked that the pilots, who had raced their T-6 warbirds at the same spot so many times, couldn’t get out of problems when they were only seconds away from landing safely at Reno-Stead Airport.
CEO of the Reno Air Racing Association Fred Telling said, “Honestly, it’s hard for me to figure out how those two expert pilots ended up in the same area of airspace at the same time.”
Telling, who raced T-6s for 10 years, doesn’t think there was a technical problem because someone would have called “Mayday.”
Both pilots sent short radio messages right before they crashed, so it doesn’t seem likely that they were sick.
It was a quick end to what was supposed to be the big finish of Reno’s run as the place where the national championships were held since 1964.
“It’s a tragedy for everyone involved, and the fact that it happened on the last day of the last Reno air show is just unbelievable,” said Scott Miller, a flying professor at San Jose State University and a private flight teacher for 30 years.
“When I first heard about it, like many pilots and spectators, I thought the accident happened during the race, not during the landing sequence,” he said. “I was really shocked and surprised.”
Telling said that the pilots who died, Chris Rushing of Thousand Oaks and Nick Macy of Tulelake, were very good at what they did. In the race Rushing won on Sunday, he was the reigning winner. Macy, who came in second, had won six times before.
The crash is being looked into by the National Transportation Safety Board, with help from the Federal Aviation Administration. In a week or two, they will share a preliminary report.
NTSB representative Sarah Sulick said that this week, wreckage was taken from two debris fields about a half mile (.8 kilometres) apart and taken away.
Partly because security costs have gone up since 2011, event organisers were already looking for a new place for the race after this year. That year, a P-51D Mustang had a mechanical problem and fell into the apron in front of the bleachers. The pilot and 10 people in the crowd were killed, and 70 others were badly hurt.
It was one of the worst things to happen at an air show in U.S. history.
The former leader of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, Richard McSpadden, said that last week’s crash seems to have happened in a “cool-down” zone.
It’s a place where pilots circle more than 2,000 feet (609 metres) above, after racing at high speeds just a few feet apart and 50 feet (15 metres) off the ground. That’s so their planes can slow down and cool down while their own energy levels go down before they start a rolling landing approach from about 1,000 feet (300 metres) up.
“The accident seems to have happened somewhere between the cool-down area, the overhead pattern, and the landing,” said McSpadden, senior vice president of the Air Safety Institute of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
In a YouTube movie that his group put up, McSpadden talked about his first thoughts. He said that the big wings on the planes used to train pilots for World War II could make it hard for the pilot in the back to see what’s going on below them. He or she could be “blind to the aircraft underneath them.”
“As event organisers, whenever we try to get planes to land in the same place, there’s always a chance of a conflict,” he said.
McSpadden said that the Reno Air Racing Association is well-known for how carefully it plans and how much it cares about safety. Pilots who are just starting out must go to a training school where they are tested on processes.
He said that these two pilots would have known them very well. “So the challenge for Reno will be to figure out, using all of these steps and the lessons they’ve learned, how a gap opened up that led to this kind of conflict.”
Telling thinks the planes had already left their cool-down zone and were getting ready to land at a higher altitude. However, he agrees that sight could have been a problem.
“If you are in a turn, something right below you would be blanked out,” he said. “Or the sun could have been too bright.”
Miller thinks the pilots thought they were farther apart than they really were. He has never flown at Reno, but he has been told that planes usually fly at the same speed during their landing routine “to make sure they keep that same relative separation.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened in this case,” he said.
McSpadden said that experienced pilots know it’s important not to relax when they’re close to landing, but it can happen.
“We’ve all heard this before,” he said, “but the flight isn’t over until the plane is turned off.”
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