Yeah, I guess we may never really know. He may have been trying to head where lead was supposed to go. It only takes one second, one missed communication, one glance at your instruments... they were moving fast enough for the P-63 to cut a B-17 in half. Things happen in a hurry in formation.
I don't think he lost sight of lead at all. I'm pretty sure he flew the 500' line multiple times during the Tora show in the "Hawk" replica, followed by a short acro demonstration and I believe he knew exactly where the airboss told the fighters to be. Ironically, his own general competence may have contributed to the accident. I still wonder if he was thinking, "why isn't lead headed for the 500' line?" and there seems to be a little hesitation in his track and that little bit of extra mental thought might have been a little extra keeping him from seeing something in the periphery.
Sounded to me more like the article said the Air Boss gave an ambiguous instruction to the fighters of the "outside edge of the runway" which is neither the 500 nor 1000 foot line, after (much) earlier telling them to be on the 500 foot line in a very long and ambiguous instruction that the fighter lead asked for clarification on.
According to the visibility study, the B-17 was visible to the P-63 for 16 continuous seconds, but in ground clutter, and would have disappeared under the wing four seconds prior to impact.
...or he understood the instruction to the fighters and went where he thought lead went. They weren't in a tight formation by any means, they were in trail and a fair bit apart.
The article differentiates between visual separation and procedural separation, and makes the point that visual separation alone is more vulnerable to human error. That's a pretty succinct summation of what went wrong with the recent midair in DC.
This is pretty much the same as what I am saying.
It's a demonstration that the backups like looking out the window saved his butt every time... Until they didn't. Normalization of deviance at work. Everything is fine 999 straight times, and then on the 1000th time you have dead people and everyone standing around wondering how this could have happened because it seems so stupid in hindsight.
Deviance, from what? Sometimes the norm is what needs to be deviated from. That's more what I was trying to say. Were the airshows safer 25 years ago?
It’s deviation from *safe* practices and procedures, not deviation from the *normal* practices and procedures.
This has no bearing on anything. As a formation pilot, being able to see another plane doesn't mean you were, or should have been, looking for it. You're looking at the plane in front of you only.
I don't know enough about running, performing in, or even watching air shows to answer the questions of what the ideal safety rules should be, what the actual safety rules in general use are, and whether air shows were safer 25 years ago. All I'm saying is that a kid whose only driving instructor is a dad who never wears a seatbelt or uses a turn signal might never learn that his safety norms deviated from ideal or generally accepted safety norms before he inherited them.
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