B-17 bomber collides with smaller plane at Dallas airshow | Hacker News Reader

B-17 bomber collides with smaller plane at Dallas airshow

twitter.com

57 pointsasasidh42 comments

Collides and people probably died. Maybe worth letting people know before they watch it. I genuinely thought it would just be a scrape.

Do airplanes regularly collide where it doesn't end in death? I can't remember many midair collisions where the planes continued flying with minor damage. I see where you're coming from asking for a warning, but I also feel like people should just assume airplane collision = death.

While you are mostly correct there have been some infamous ones such as the 1983 Negev incident where an F-15 and A-4 Skyhawk collided and the F-15 landed without a wing https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/that-time-an-f-15-landed-withou...

or that time a couple of F/A-18 Hornets collided and both managed to land with substantial damage https://theaviationgeekclub.com/u-s-naval-aviator-explains-h...

Nothing in the link description said it was mid-air.

My first thought on reading was it was on the ground, like in "East Midlands Airport: Taxiing planes collide in morning fog" at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-48104527 or "Two planes collide at Lagos International Airport" at https://dailypost.ng/2020/07/30/two-planes-collide-at-lagos-... . Both during taxiing.

I suspect most airplane collisions occur on the ground, but that's a wild-ass guess.

Probably rare but it happens.

I remember this was pretty big news when it happened:

https://nypost.com/2021/05/13/two-planes-collide-midair-in-c...

Edit: above link reports on midair collision of a Cirrus SR22 and a Swearingen Metroliner in May 2021.

B-17s collided and died in WW2 a lot because of the close formations, often in poor visibility.

Often enough that it isn't good practice to assume one outcome or the other.

Why?

If something happens X happens 90% of the time and Y happens 10% of the time, I think it's safe to assume X, especially where there's little downside to a false positive.

"Collides and people probably died"

They all died. People don't survive plane collisions.

You'd be surprised at how often they do--especially at how often the planes involved land safely despite the damage.

Maybe their ejector seat from 1943 didn't work then.

I can't believe I'm linking to the Daily Mail, but it seems to have the most detail, and is more informative than the video alone. The smaller plane is stated to be a Bell P-63 Kingcobra.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11420933/Planes-cra...

This thread has a lot of good info

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/yth3g7/plane_cras...

Looks more like the smaller aircraft collided with the B17, given how the B17 got cut in half behind the wing roots.

How does that happen, the smaller plane would appear to be almost perfectly placed to see the B-17?

My best guess based on the video is that the P-63 pilot had been high and out of position in formation, and tried to get back in position using both geometry and speed. He may have recognized that he had too much closure and wasn't in position to safely underrun the B-17, and tried to bank and pull to get safe lateral separation, inadvertently putting himself into a blind lead turn where he wouldn't be able to see the B-17 through his wing or fuselage. The blind lead turn is an incredibly dangerous maneuver in formation flight--typically prohibited in military air combat training--for obvious reasons.

A different angle that helped me understand your description better (graphic warning: scared children voices in the background audio)

https://twitter.com/jasonwhitely/status/1591541681798668291?...

Yeah, I understand now.

That is terrible.

Look at the cockpit view from a P-63 Kingcobra. No chance.

https://www.detailandscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/01...

Seems the opposite to me, but I'm no pilot. The smaller plane was making a banking left turn. Even if the B17 we're visible on the lower right side of the cocokput, the pilot was probably looking to the left where they were headed.

Pilot's eye level view: https://www.flickr.com/photos/20087013@N02/26600648661

Though you can't see much below you.

That is my thing, how can this happen. I had to google to see if this was true:

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/12/1136307205/dallas-airshow-bom...

I feel bad about the pilots, does not look good any survivors.

Or not? It's in a banked left turn, and since it was a collision course, the B17 would have been "under" him out of view. I would not complete the maneuver if I couldn't see it though, so who knows.

tragic loss of life and history -- I hope this incident furthers understanding about how to avoid these kind of recurrences in future air-shows.

6 feared dead in the collision https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/12/dallas-airsh...

The smaller aircraft was reportedly a Bell P-63 Kingcobra from WWII, and part of the air show.

Needs a viewer discretion warning.

Man it almost looks intentional from the footage, but I don't think the small plane could get such a precise hit if he tried.

1000% the fault of the small plane and a terrible loss to a historical treasure.

This has no place on HN

Disagree. This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen here in recent months. It's tragic, yes, but also fascinating -- and not just in a rubbernecking way.

I didn't know B-17s were still airworthy, and you don't hear about planes crashing into each other often, even at airshows. As someone casually interested in aviation, I would very much like to hear analysis about how this could've happened, etc.

I never would have expected a video depicting death on HN, especially one involving airplanes.

A disproportionate amount of the best hardware and firmware engineers I know have pilots licenses and are very interested in the mechanics and technical details of flight. Seems perfect for HN.

Seriously doubt any firmware was involved as these aircraft would be manually operated, but I could be wrong. Mechanical malfunction or pilot error would more likely be the cause. Sorry for the loss of life in any case.

How is any of that related to a video showing 6 people dying? This is, literally, like saying you’re into cars, so you watch fatal car crash videos. Sounds like complete nonsense. It’s been flagged to death, so the sentiment wasn’t shared.

Airplane crashes provide an excellent opportunity for failure analysis. IMHO its kind of a decent fit, but the final report will be a better fit.

This is quite ghoulish and fits into the latter category IMO.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

It's the kind of thing you probably wouldn't hear about on TV news unless you were in that same geographical area. It's interesting not because it's a disaster but because of the engineering and (presumed) avoidability involved... the "what went wrong?" angle.

This is all over the US media, there's no engineering content here yet, just a disaster.

shrug We'll just have to disagree.

Agreed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com