Hellcat into a truck?

[Coyote Chris]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

There are incidents for sure at OSH, some of which seem to be "not discussed"...but when you consider the number of operations 9,000 aircraft generate over a week, statistically they are pretty low....
Check this out...

http://www.eaavideo.org/video.aspx?v=2680136529001

I would like to know what the GC guy was doing at the time of the collision with the two vehicles....I am not blaming him/her....I would go even more nuts than I am doing air traffic control....but I believe that the FAA/RARA will be discussing this incident and will come up with some constructive ideas....
As an aside, we met a pretty young lady from Canada more than once at McDonalds who does ATC work in British Columbia...she came down to volunteer at Reno and said she did Race Control....wonder if that was her voice I was listening to on the scanner?

IIRC, there was a warbird vs. Vans RV-? taxi incident at OSH a few years back the resulted in a fatality.

Didn't see the incident at Reno but, wasn't the fire truck providing escort to the Jet Man truck and doesn't the tower have someone watching/controlling ground ops? Not trying to point fingers, just curious.

[Sky Critter]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

IIRC, there was a warbird vs. Vans RV-? taxi incident at OSH a few years back the resulted in a fatality.

Didn't see the incident at Reno but, wasn't the fire truck providing escort to the Jet Man truck and doesn't the tower have someone watching/controlling ground ops? Not trying to point fingers, just curious.

[Coyote Chris]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

Leo, I agree with you 100 percent....at OSH, you can stand right behind a Mustang as it winds up and moves out to taxi to the active, but there are volunteers all around it to keep it (and you) safe.....

I have nothing against SpeckMan....but you cant appreciate him the way they present him.....bring back the SAAB driving team!

Seems to me that the outer ramp shouldn't have any vehicle traffic on it unless positively controlled. Yeah, a pilot should be S turning but should anything be out there during aircraft movement unless both crucial, and known to all? JMHO.
Whenever the jets moved they had people out there keeping it clear.
Speck man! Love it!
While I have respect for the cojones of anyone willing to strap jet engines to their back and jump from a helicopter, it was not the venue for it as far as I was concerned.

[Leo]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

Seems to me that the outer ramp shouldn't have any vehicle traffic on it unless positively controlled. Yeah, a pilot should be S turning but should anything be out there during aircraft movement unless both crucial, and known to all? JMHO.
Whenever the jets moved they had people out there keeping it clear.
Speck man! Love it!
While I have respect for the cojones of anyone willing to strap jet engines to their back and jump from a helicopter, it was not the venue for it as far as I was concerned.

[Coyote Chris]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

OK, well, I will bite. I do have 50 hours in a PA-28 and a piece of plastic that says I am a pilot, but mostly I go to airshows and especially OSH and Reno. At OSH, ground traffic is very tightly controlled by hoards of volunteers so there are very few incidents such as the one at Reno. Sure, I see lots of strange stuff like two planes trying to land on the same runway in different directions, but we are talking 9,000 aircraft in organized chaos....
I am not going to blame anyone for the Reno incident...I am just glad no one was hurt. Most of us know that tail dragger warbirds are supposed to "S" turn on the taxi way so the pilot can see if there is anything he/she might hit. If you spend time in the stands at Reno, you know some pilots do this more than others.
I guess many might say the ultimate blame might be put on the pilot. He/she is driving an aircraft around all those fire trucks and Speck Man vehicles that are stopped, after all. But few incidents are all one sided. I would like to see some procedural changes...make this a constructive incident. Not a blame game. I will leave the procedure changes up to the big wigs and pilots, but I would have ground vehicles, especially Speckman type vehicles, more tightly controlled. And there's nothing wrong with having a person on ground control in the tower watching for trouble, ready to shout out if need be. We all know why race control has the pilots call base with the gear....that is a good procedure.
Perhaps RARA/and the FAA (in case you didn't know this, the FAA was everywhere at Reno watching things) can make some constructive changes and good procedures....

[AAFO_WSagar]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

Agreed. We don't need headlines on the unfortunate.

Help me out here guys, the more we post on this one, the more it gets to the top of the heap, so it gets more notice. I know, this really isn't a huge issue, it just strikes me that this sort of thread could play into a negative mind set with someone new to the entire process. Not to minimize any kind of ramp/taxiway/runway... any way!! vehicle to vehicle contact, important to remember the amount of ramp traffic at a given moment in a race/show schedule would probably equal the busiest commercial ramp anywhere, again, emphaisis on "given moment".. Parking a non airplane vehicle, i.e. something not wide enough to see with a normal tail dragger visual sweep, in an area where said tail dragger does not expect you be, is probably not a good idea? Last sentence, speculation on my part.. logical conclusion?

Defeating my own thoughts by responding...

Thoughts?

[Idaho_cowpony]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

Agreed. We don't need headlines on the unfortunate.

[AAFO_WSagar]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

Just thinking out loud here... is this one of those things that even though we know the FAA and the entire world knows about it, that it would be better if we sort of buried it here?

Seriously, NOT trying to diss anyone for posting anything, or over moderate!, it just struck me when I saw the last posts come in that this *could* be one of those events better discussed years later??

Opinions??

[AcroGimp]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

What is the story behind this accident anyway? Mutha drove Hornets and ran NAS LeMoore, seems like a careful, professional pilot, just curious how this happened.

Any witnesses?

'Gimp

[Coyote Chris]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

[ChrisMX105]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

I wonder what it would take to duplicate them. Or if the data is even out there.

[Big_Jim]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

De-railing thread..........

Was the "thin" prop more effective/efficient than a standard one?

Yes, there were two sets of experimental blades that Aeroproducts built up for high-speed testing with NACA. J.D. Reed purchased one set for use on the Beguine, and Joe DeBona purchased the other set for use in Thunderbird, which he won the 1949 Bendix race with.

Reed's set was destroyed in the crash at Cleveland. In 1975 Ralph Payne somehow tracked down the set that was used on Thunderbird and procured them for Precious Metal that he was building up for Gary Levitz. I think Ralph told me once that at altitude/temp/power setting testing they had a significant speed increase over the cuffed Hamilton Standard prop--ironically the prop of choice these days. But I also recall him saying that the prop itself was scary, as it was so thin that during high-power run-ups on the ground you could literally see the blades bending forward because they were so thin.

[ChrisMX105]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

De-railing thread..........

Was the "thin" prop more effective/efficient than a standard one?

[Big_Jim]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

According to a buddy Reno 78 taxi accident was the original Precious Metal ( Not Thom's) with Whittington chopping up the Datsun.

The incident you're referring to was 1977 not 1978. And it did, in fact involve the REAL Precious Metal (N5483V), not the currently-named version (N6WJ). Race Director Jerry Duty decided it would be okay to drive out on the ramp after the Championship Race and park it in the podium area to meet Darryl Greenamyer as he came in in the Red Baron....after all, when you're the all-powerful Jerky Doody you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want. Don Whittington, who had finished second, came taxiing in around the crowd of people who were starting to gather and thoroughly munched up Jerry's tiny little Datsun.

The real shame of that accident was that it destroyed a very rare and one (actually two) of a kind experimental thin-blade propeller. The other set was destroyed in the crash of the Beguine in 1949.

I am going to post two photos taken by Charlene Aro and one by Mark Daniels. I know both of them so I hope this suffices for posting someone elses photos...but they illustrate pretty effectively what happened.

[AcroGimp]

Re: Hellcat into a truck?

At least they have a sense of humor about it:



"Mutha was here"

I was wondering if that was Mutha in Mimsi III, bummer.

'Gimp