Procrastination in action. Another half second and he would have been a flaming human lawn dart.
UPDATE:
Captain Bews was treated for minor scrapes and has a sore back but was released from the hospital on Friday.
Reminds me of footage they have shown several times on (IIRC) Hist. Chan. Two Russian pilots clip each others wings at an air show; both planes crash in huge fireballs. Then, you see the parachutes. Soon, you see a pilot, in full flight suit walking out of the smoke, carrying his helmet. He pauses, lights up a cigarette, and saunters on. This guy was cool (Kool?). It occurred to me upon at least one viewing that reminding this particular pilot that smoking was bad for his health was a bit redundant.
Apparently at least one schnook has so expired. Another thundberbird pilot:And another thing. When I see these narrow escapes, I always wonder if some poor schnook has ever safely ejected and then landed in his own fireball.
The first was the death of Major Joe Howard flying Thunderbird 3 on June 4, 1972 at Dulles Airport, during Transpo 72. His Phantom (F-4E s/n# 66-0321) experienced a structural failure of the horizontal stabilizer. Maj Howard ejected as the aircraft fell back to earth from about 1,500 feet tail first and descended under a good canopy, but was too close to the explosion fireball and did not survive.
Cool vid - pilot a cool hand as well, hung with it until 0.8 seconds before impact. Weird cause on that accident, according to Wiki. The pilots use above ground level (AGL) readings for their stunts - as in this vid in which he should have entered it at a minimum of 2500 feet AGL. But the instruments only showed altitude in readings above mean sea level (MSL). Since home base was 1100 feet lower MSL than the location of the show, he entered the stunt at only 1600 feet AGL - oops. I'm a tad confused about that cause though, I thought altimeters could be adjusted to reflect the MSL of the actual ground level at a certain location so pilots could minimize that whole running-out-of-sky problem.I saw this crash in person:
I was about 50 feet away from the camera so this was pretty much exactly what I saw.
The wreckage came very close to clobbering the control tower, as you can see.
There were several thousand spectators on the opposite side of the runways (across from the tower, behind the camera), so it was a good thing the pilot crashed on the other side.
The pilot actually ejected a split second before the crash, and got up and walked away, although it was a few minutes before the crowd knew that so for that brief period of time we thought we had just seen a man die. Very surreal.