Two Growlers down - crews apparently ejected OK.

https://www.youtube.com/live/-Hs89WM...qdKMaVF1hK6Boj

https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/northwest/idaho/article315790106.html


https://youtu.be/WO7FvvP33r0?si=L4swJm0DV85yLMpE

 

Looked like a couple birds fornicating in flight.

Lucky the fuselages were offset as well as one crew ejecting didn’t impact the other crew.

 

Yes it did.

or somebody get sucked into an inlet or tangled in the debris

But it seems we have a proliferation of “demo teams.” Granted, The Blue Angels and Thunderbirds probably are worth it for recruiting PR, but at some point we need to say enough is enough. Maybe we are approaching that point?

 

The demo teams are a great sub if you can't get the Blue Angles or Thunderbirds, due to how small your show is, or the lead time, or just the scheduling pace of the sanctioned teams...I've worked with them before and they can be great when the aircraft has some extreme capabilities, like F-22s, etc. But electronic-warfare F-18s is pretty far "out-there" in terms of being pretty ridiculous IMO, especially when you have the Thunderbirds or one of the large teams. Also, the demo-teams are supposed to be single-ship demos. Likely for reasons involved in this unfortunate accident.

 

Growlers can fill the bill for a loud pointy noise crowd pleaser, the electronic stuff is irrelevant for the demo mission, at that point it's just another hornet.

But it's a very expensive hornet, maybe better to use clapped out C models for that?

And yeah not sure why you need more than one doing the demo, air show formation flying is getting into Blue Angel/T-Bird business, and there's a reason that mission is a full-time job. Sure, send a two ship to the air show, but one of them should just be a static display.

Yes amazing luck that everybody was able to jump out. So many ways that could have gone wrong.

Maybe worth noting that the DoD has done the analysis on the cost of participating in public demo activities... it does actually provide an ROI because it turns out it's an amazing motivation for boys and young men to get them interested in the military. It would actually cost more to deploy enough strip-mall recruiters to do the same job. Just need to not crash of course.

 

^^^this^^^ just lost $160M+ in aircraft for really no good reason… let the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels do the airshow circuit… other than them just do simple flybys