Has anyone ever flown into the Wings Over Houston show at Ellington?

I am wondering about the volume of traffic and how soon I need to arrive and how soon we can depart after the show (I want to get home before the 'Bama game starts).

Y'all see this video from the Rice Festival in Winnie? According to the interweb this Stearman was being towed as a float in the parade and was originally going to be towed back to the airport, but because of wx coming in the owner/pilot decided to try to fly it out when he clipped a light pole and some wires. You can see the Sheriff's dept had the road blocked off to the intersection but dang... it was almost a disaster, luckily cars weren't lined up all the way to the intersection or there could have been fatalities on the ground. He hit in a blank area between vehicles. No serious injury to pilot, Stearman, not so much.




ETA much higher res video in FB link from Chambers Co Sheriff

https://www.facebook.com/100066869354044/videos/pcb.194596022779375/247963677261167

Do you need to call ahead at Aston? Or can you just show up on gameday?

AlexAggie said:

---

Do you need to call ahead at Aston? Or can you just show up on gameday?

---

You can probably just show up. They have an online form you can fill out as well.

TxAg20 said:

---

I tookoff from San Marcos 2 behind this rare bird on Saturday:

https://imgur.com/a/J0lE0N9

---

Nice! I got behind her in the pattern at McKinney many years ago. Radio call was Boeing 29Bravo!

Cool thread. Just found out. Sorry I missed the good pilot speak!

I spent 8 years in the AF and 33 with a major. Still flying the Airbus 350. Miss the Boings tho…

Southlake said:

---

Cool thread. Just found out. Sorry I missed the good pilot speak!

I spent 8 years in the AF and 33 with a major. Still flying the Airbus 350. Miss the Boings tho…

---

I was a late comer as well. Welcome!

One of my best flying stories:


When I was in the Air Force, we were doing a City DV mission, flying San Diego city big wigs up and down the California coast. We parked on the ramp at Miramar and we were flight planning in the cockpit when the Distinguished Visitors bus drove up and they got out to wait to board.

Just about at the same time, one of our loadmasters unplugged the full waste reservoir right there on the ramp. A bluish tidal wave of human waste went rolling across the ramp right at the horrified executives. They scattered in their high heels and business suits - some back on the bus and some evading the effluence.

Fortunately, they all avoided the stuff and eventually boarded. They were even laughing and joking about it.

I thought it was the end of my career, but nothing was ever said about it.

141s?

Is it actually powered with (4) engines?

MaroonDontRun said:

---

Is it actually powered with (4) engines?

---

Yes, and carries a pilot. It is not RC

Do we know what engines he used? Rotax?

I have enough expense taking care of one IO-360 much less 2 or 4 of them.

MaroonDontRun said:

---

Do we know what engines he used? Rotax?

I have enough expense taking care of one IO-360 much less 2 or 4 of them.

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bally_B-17

Labor of love!

Quote:

---

The Bally Bomber took 17 years and 40,000 man-hours to get into the air, and eventually to the EAA AirVenture Convention held annually in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Thousands of EAA members have followed Bally's progress for years, and AirVenture 2018 attendees had a chance to see the finished result in person.

---

Takes this guy 20 years to build a novelty aircraft and takes Mike Patey 20 weeks.

There's gotta be a happy medium.

Sad he passed before he really got a chance to enjoy it, but the Bally Bomber was definitely a cool thing to see in person.

Know we talked about it when it happened but the accident investigation is out for the Columbus T-38 mishap. Worth the read and a good reminder as always of the dangerous nature of flying.


https://cdispatch.com/news/2021-10-09/air-force-releases-report-on-feb-crash-that-killed-2-cafb-pilots/

My Favorite Pilot had a few Japanese as a T-6 IP. Said they were generally good students, but would never tell you "no", at least at first. You had to drag it out of them.

Do you understand?
Yes!
Do you understand?
Yes.
Do you understand?
.....No.

It's just not in their culture to tell a superior "no".

I wonder if it also is hard for them to ask for help, or admit they don't quite get a concept.

Also note that the student pulled the throttles back to idle for only18 seconds before the IP took over, rolled level, and hit Max AB.

18 Seconds. That's a damn thin margin, and a reminder why aviation is a hazardous profession.

Agree with a lot of what you're saying in general.

That particular circle is pretty benign, basically brings you in to the downwind.

Haven't flown the 38 but from the report they stay 80% or so power through the final turn normally which is way higher than anything I've flown. 18 seconds at idle in both jets I've flown where you hang out closer to idle is a long time.

Nothing against the mishap IP, we ask a lot out of our FAIPs* and I bet most can point to similar things they had happen with students but he just got the short straw in where it happened.


*FAIP is a first assignment instructor pilot. They go straight from pilot training to instructor school then back to pilot training. As a 38 guy he was getting students with 80-100 hours total time and instructing them in a 70 year old jet

This video is long but he breaks down the report in detail. If you're unfamiliar with this guy/channel, he flies adversary T-38s in the Guard as well as commercial (737, I think) and previously flew F-16s and F-18s.

The TL;DR of the video is task saturation of both student and instructor and failure to monitor speed/throttles. Lots of factors adding to it all. In previous video, he has been critical of the continued use of the very out of date T-38 and while not blatant in this video, touches on that some more in this one.

That looks like a North American T-28 which is one of my favorites. Really cool!

Very interesting video. Seems there were so many contributing factors to this crash.

Question for pilots -- In the effort to recover, the IP put the throttles to AB and pulled up. I realize they were very close to the ground but, would they have gained airspeed and control of the aircraft quicker by leveling the aircraft rather than nose up?

Probably. Not sure why he pulled nose up, but if you're at 250 feet and the ground is coming up at 1100fpm, I suspect almost anyone would be yanking the stick back.

The problem, of course, was lack of thrust. Takes a long time for a jet engine to spool up from idle and start pushing. And the -38s have such tiny wings, the wing loading is about 70 pounds per square foot, compared to say, a Cessna 172 with less than 15#/ft2 at max weight.

A full Cessna weighs about 2500 pounds, a T-38 about 12,000. A Cessna has 174 sq.ft. of wing, a -38 has less, 170 sq.ft.


As to an earlier comment about the age of the jets, My Favorite Pilot soloed in a T-38 that was built 21 years before she was born, so it was literally twice her age.

I'm pretty sure they have updated avionics, and about 5-10 years ago, they upgraded all of them to the newest ejection seat technology.

She said a lot of the buttons on the inside had the labels rubbed off from constant use.

They were so far behind the airplane at that point I don't know that anything would have helped. 250 ft off the ground with the sink rate they had sounds like a no-win situation. I fly with the condition lever in ground idle full-time, and it's a slooow return to power at idle.

One red flag that stuck out to me in the report was the 9 day training gap because of weather. I have about 4k hrs in my working plane, fly it about 600-800 hrs/yr, and am very proficient in it. Yesterday I worked it for the first time in 2 weeks and I was rusty, anything over 5 days out of the cockpit and I have to take a little time to remember the limits and how far I can push it safely. The instructor was low time and 9 days removed from the cockpit. At 2204Z they took off, 2hrs later than planned because of weather so I'm sure there's some anxiety, and hit the ground 36 mins later on approach. Nowhere in that 36 mins did they take the time to knock the rust off, it was all setting up the approach. Taking 20 mins to feel out the plane could've gone a long way in preventing this.

Quote:

---

They were so far behind the airplane at that point I don't know that anything would have helped.

---

Watching the video, the report apparently says that at the moment the IP realized things were Very Wrong, they could have successfully ejected. One second after that, the sink rate was too high.

CanyonAg77 said:

---

Quote:

---

They were so far behind the airplane at that point I don't know that anything would have helped.

---

Watching the video, the report apparently says that at the moment the IP realized things were Very Wrong, they could have successfully ejected. One second after that, the sink rate was too high.

---

To clarify, when the IP noticed the throttles at idle, that was the last time safe ejection was possible. As a non-pilot, I'm guessing that if anyone was dropped into that exact scenario at that exact moment, basically no one would choose ejection as the first choice. I would bet trying to fly out of the problem is the first instinct which means that the only solution would have been to notice the issue earlier (obviously earlier=better).

Like I said, I'm not a pilot so I would be interested to hear the professionals' opinions, but my take away from the video is that once he noticed the problem, making it out was not humanly possible.