Polish F-16 crashes during Radom airshow rehearsals

He was on full afterburner? I watched 4 different videos on this.

Well, the people got a show
 
AV8R_87 said:
Looks like a loop gone wrong, all he needed to recover was maybe an extra 50-100ft.

theaviationist.com

Breaking: Polish F-16 Crashes During Radom Airshow Rehearsal, Pilot Dies

The jet, assigned to the Polish F-16 Tiger Demo Team, was rehearsing for the Radom Air Show planned for Aug. 30 and 31. A Polish Air Force F-16 Fighting
theaviationist.com theaviationist.com
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I’d say he needed more altitude than an extra 50-100 ft….that jet wasn’t even close to being in level flight when he impacted, but in any case, he was way low over the top. Being in full grunt during the first 90 deg of the backside (inverted/nose pulling through horizon, until pure nose low) was a poor choice too. RIP, terrible to see.
 
Classic accelerated stall. Airshow loops are different from contest or training loops. You want to finish 7/8 of the loop high, then adjust the last 1/8 so you approach the ground at a low angle.
 
Ed Haywood said:
Classic accelerated stall. Airshow loops are different from contest or training loops. You want to finish 7/8 of the loop high, then adjust the last 1/8 so you approach the ground at a low angle.
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The F-16 has both a G-limiter and an AOA limiter. If as described, it was more likely riding one or the other of those limiters into the ground due to entering low and/or fast.

Nauga,
and the reason for maneuver gates
 
At 2:20 he explains the G limiter / AoA limiter. Just watching an interview recently on TheAfterburner podcast and the guest (Jell-o) talked about how he didn’t care for the AoA limiter in the F-16. Obviously done to keep the aircraft within a safe envelope but he seemed to think it would be even a better fighter if it just had a little more nose up authority.

 
nauga said:
The F-16 has both a G-limiter and an AOA limiter. If as described, it was more likely riding one or the other of those limiters into the ground due to entering low and/or fast.

Nauga,
and the reason for maneuver gates
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I would hate to be pointing at the ground and have the aircraft override me. I guess it's unavoidable with FBW though. Wonder if coming off the power when he recognized the issue might have got him through it?
 
Ed Haywood said:
I would hate to be pointing at the ground and have the aircraft override me.
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Would you rather pull reflexively into an unrecoverable deep stall? Or pull beyond CLmax and only make the situation worse?
Ed Haywood said:
Wonder if coming off the power when he recognized the issue might have got him through it?
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Assuming for a moment that it was pilot error and there were no compounding airplane or physiological issues the best solution would be to ensure he's on the preplanned numbers before burying the nose and flying the maneuver as designed, or aborting when it was clear the gate would be missed.
This is far from the first time it's happened that way and it won't be the last.

Nauga,
in the doghouse
 
Velocity173 said:
Obviously done to keep the aircraft within a safe envelope but he seemed to think it would be even a better fighter if it just had a little more nose up authority.
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Everybody *thinks* they can fly better with limiters off...right up to the point where they can't, and the airplane departs. There is an AOA limiter override in the F-16 - and you use it when you beat the limiter and end up in a region where you don't have enough nose *down* authority.

The issue in a tac demo loop that flies a perfectly good (limited) airplane into the ground is not the limiters, it's not meeting the pre-established conditions required to complete the maneuver and trying it anyway. The same thing has happened in Hornets, which have no AOA limiter.

Nauga,
 
Could the amount of fuel on board have been excessi8ve, reducing the performance in this maneuver?

That was an impressive long and large stream of fire following him down the runway.
 
Not a unique accident sequence of events in this space, sadly. "Grey jets" are not particularly great acro machines, from a vertical real estate pov. And they don't need to be; it's not their designed use-case.

One of the things I ponder, given this whole thing is ultimately just recruitment fodder, perhaps the purist aspect of this shtick could be diluted enough to build better altitude buffer for the party trick. Take the whole script and just fly/transition the down-verticals in the oblique. Done. The mouthbreathers on the ramp won't know the difference, the kids still get to grow up wanting to single-seat/be a real pilot (I keed I keed), and a father gets to come home to wifey and the kiddo. Granted, my x-platform rage-followers remind me I'm just a LARPer, but you'd be amazed the amount of stuff you pick up over 20 years of swinging a bokuto around for regional airline money. :biggrin:
 
nauga said:
Everybody *thinks* they can fly better with limiters off...right up to the point where they can't, and the airplane departs. There is an AOA limiter override in the F-16 - and you use it when you beat the limiter and end up in a region where you don't have enough nose *down* authority.

The issue in a tac demo loop that flies a perfectly good (limited) airplane into the ground is not the limiters, it's not meeting the pre-established conditions required to complete the maneuver and trying it anyway. The same thing has happened in Hornets, which have no AOA limiter.

Nauga,
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A small point of order, the Viper MPO switch just gave full stab authority. Sort of like SRM in the F/A-18, though a slightly different application. You’re already way past the AoA limiter at the point you’d use it (it’s part of the OCF boldface, in the “inverted deep stall” section). But i agree with the rest of this, and i might just be arguing semantics here
 
FlightmechH3 said:
He was on full afterburner? I watched 4 different videos on this.
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Yea, realized he was way too low and probably tried to get enough power to flatten out the loop and go horizontal and stop the descent. Who knows, had he kicked in the after burners a few seconds earlier it may have worked.
 
I wonder if the conformal fuel tanks had anything to do with a performance reduction in pitch rate.
 
Velocity173 said:
I wonder if the conformal fuel tanks had anything to do with a performance reduction in pitch rate.
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Legitimate military demos are neither ad lib nor spontaneous. The demo profile *should* have been (and usually is) designed for a particular configuration and flown in that configuration. Pitch rate might be affected, excess power and resulting sustainable rate and radius definitely would be...but *should have* been accounted for in the target parameters. This could not have been the first time this profile was flown in a similarly-configured airplane, one should wonder why the previous ones were successful and this one was not. There may very well have been issues that we are not aware of that degraded performance - time will tell - but there is a common reason several (many?) perfectly good airplanes and pilots have bottomed out in airshows.

Nauga,
as briefed
 
Seen a couple of posts that he got a talking to at RIAT earlier this year. Did a darn good F-16 demo though.

 
RE: RIAT, it's certainly a balancing act. They don't want to end up creating a political environment where these displays are shut down. European societies are already on the wavelength of the spectrum they consider things like recreational flying so gratuitous it shouldn't be accessible to the "collective". Not a big leap for these societies to extend that ban to something as gratuitous as demo airshows for military outreach/recruiting.

All in all, I think the position of advocating performers only mort themselves in the event of a bone-up, is a very reasonable compromise all things considered.
 
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