I've come to recognize you feel personally aggrieved by scrutiny of certain individuals affiliated with this club.
I'm not personally aggrieved, but my sense of justice, IS offended, OTOH, that there are so many obvious and egregiously ignorant slanders of people taking place that are so easily disproven by simple research.
It's fine to scrutinize, but seriously people (not aimed at you, Hindsight), do your research before you make definitive and serious allegations. As an example, the top comment on the latest on this incident on the Blancolirio channel, that he even pinned, for instance, has over 1000 likes and 340 replies... and yet is easily disproven by footage from last year's 2021 WOD airshow. That's not cool. In addition, all of the chaff - and that's what a TON of the online commentary is, is throwing a ton of people on red herring trails and building straw man arguments against warbirds, old airplanes, and the CAF in general. All of that does nothing for safety or prevention. I spent 5 minutes on the phone with a friend yesterday who was trying to tell me all about the drone that hit the P-63. What a waste of time and electrons, even though I love my friend.
And, speaking of straw men...
But do take a step back and re-read, because I think you're straw manning my comment.
My post (#491) which you quoted, wasn't referring at all to the air boss qualifications or moral character. To reiterate my position, my post was only clarifying that it seemed to me as though
@PaulS was asking about the decision/maneuver to shackle the formations in trail, not the show at-large, when he asked rhetorically about how long this has been working. I raised the question whether that has always been part of the show. There's no evidence to show it has, unless someone privy to the brief can say yes, that horrendous shackle was in fact pre-planned.
So that was the context of my post. Now on to my opinion: I do happen to believe that was a terrible decision, to wit causal to the accident, and not Hutain's obvious and exceedingly well-video-recorded execution error in the conduct of the shackle, which has been picked apart to death on here already. It was an imprudent decision on the part of the airboss, and I hope the NTSB and FAA pounce all over that angle. And
I '
stand by that comment', since we're being gratuitously emphatic now apparently.
Ok, so I accept that as what you meant. I can see that, but as far as I can remember, it's been fairly normal to see the fighters and bombers stacked, but they then, at least in Dallas, usually then sequence them towards the end of the display back down to the lower altitude and space them into trail for the "photo pass" sequences, where the aircraft pass by one by one with reasonable distance in between planes in a nice arc for the cameras. That always requires essentially the same kind of maneuver, albeit spaced better, so to me it doesn't seem like an innovation that happened just this year.
As to the exemption letter, we just agree to disagree. I don't think it is necessary for the accident to be in the conduct of a paid ride, for them to lose that privilege. I think the FAA can easily scrutinize this operation and find they're not trust worthy of that exemption.
We can two circle that one til we run out of fuel, neither you nor I are the FAA, so we won't know until they pipe up about it.
I believe in the end the FAA will probably (hopefully?) see that differently, and I believe if you looked at current CAF safety materials and efforts at culture changes, you might find yourself surprised, but yeah, probably not worth circling over.
The only reason I bring the letter up is because I happen to believe they can't survive without it, which again folks are free to disagree; it's a conversation. The insurance going forward is another element within that question, that is currently open as well.
So, there are planes that do a lot of rides, and also expensive planes that didn't do any rides, like obviously the P-63. I doubt very much that survival will depend on rides. Regarding rides, the unit I was helping was trying to decide whether or not to get the L-2 that I was helping out with ride-ready or not, and there were rules fairly close to a 135 operation in place, with drug testing and all. It's a very serious safety program including the maintenance requirements run at the local unit level, and there are 70+ different units across the country. I fail to see how a timing error at an airshow should be justly used to ground all of the non-formation revenue rides any more than a mid-air collision in a Cessna Citation in some traffic pattern should make the rest of the Citation fleet uninsurable. We don't do that to airlines, cars, Part 135 ops, and it's a double standard if it's done here.
