Thunderbird Crash Footage

"Jay Honeck" writes:

The pilot survived, right?

His health is fine.

His career, I sadly suspect, is not.

A comment from one of the ASF people at a CFIRC I was at over the
past weekend was that he is now flying a desk at the Pentagon.

The same man stated that the problem was that the pilot had become
too comfortable with practicing the maneuver at his home base, which
was about 800 (+/-; I don't recall the exact number) feet lower
than the airfield at which the accident occurred. At the accident
location he set up the split-S so that the top was at the proper
altitude MSL -- at his home base, meaning that the entire maneuver
was executed 800 feet lower than it should have been.

I have *no* military jet experience, but especially for airshows I'm
somewhat surprised that there isn't an altimeter set to QFE to serve
as a sanity check against exactly this sort of problem.

Joe Morris