Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
Dudley Henriques wrote in
:

Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
Dudley Henriques wrote in
:

Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
Dudley Henriques wrote in
:
Cool. Not a lot you can do when you leave a wreck somewhere anyway
but own up.
Wonder what he'd make of his countrymen's craze for burying vintage
aircraft.


Bertie
It's been a mess over there for sure. That last Hurricane was a real
shame. I lost three friends in the UK in unrelated accidents in the
last several years. Ted Girdler (ex- Red Arrow 1972 was killed
several years ago doing a show, and Ormond Hayden-Bailee was killed
several years ago. Both were in the old IFPF as charter members.
Hoof Proudfoot dug a hole at Duxford with a P38 doing a double roll.
Another first rate display pilot gone.
The list gets larger every year it seems.

eah, I saw Proubfoot display that -38 and I have to say I was less
than impressed. Loops were done with precious little room and he was
doing fairly low rolls pointed right at the crowd. This was at the
50th anniv of D-day so was June 1994, about a year before he crashed
it. I also recently saw that RN guy who keeps crashing airplanes
display a Skyraider. To be fair he didn;t get as low as I've seen him
do in the past, but still, it all just didn;t look right and I
thought it was all kind of pointless, especailly since the airplane
was fairly ugly anyway!


Bertie

First lesson 101 for display flying;

The crowd is split between those who don't appreciate the difference
between 500 feet and 50 feet, and those who do appreciate the
difference are the ones you don't need to please.


Well, looks like he might have finally learned that, or the CAA finally
put the skids on him.
I mentioned my friend that's displaying there now. He was telling me
about His certification. He's very disciplined and prepares extremely
well for his shows. He was telling me that the examiner or whatever he'd
be called there commented that his is the direction they would like to
go, so obviously they've also realised things have to change. Mind you,
this was before the Hurricane accident so maybe not.
I think the problem there is that people are easily bullied by the likes
of Beattie, the CAA included. I knew an RAF pilot, for instance. The man
shouldn't have been let anywhere near any kind of airplane. Even a chuck
glider was well beyond this guy, but he spoke proper and managed to pile
up bull**** and so rose to a very high position in the RAF. After he
left he became a management pilot at a big UK airline. Well, for a
while. After a series of incidents someone eventually figured out that
he was useless and he was eventaully hounded out of the place, but in
the meantime , whew!


Bertie


This kind of thing happens.

There are a lot of us out here who are and were connected with display
flying who "talk" to each other via email all the time. Many of us in
this loop are still active. Some are air show people; some are military;
some are race pilots some are Red Bull pilots. We're in no way
"official", but we communicate all the time. Official or not, we have a
deep reach into official channels in several countries and much of what
we discuss safety wise ends up implemented in some way into the way
things are done.
My own personal feelings about air show safety have evolved somewhat
from my active days as a pilot. The safety issues are very real and are
deserving of constant attention by the display community.
I for one don't have all the answers. I keep active and at least have a
small voice in the matter.
Anyway, it keeps me hopping sometimes :-))


--
Dudley Henriques