I lecture about air show safety, and much of my material comes from learning as a young air show pilot in the beginning of the CF-18 days so many years ago. Back then, none of the safeguards and guidance that exist today were in place. The CF-18 demonstration was passed on from year to year, with technical details and safety gates fading over time. We didn’t kill anyone but I, and others, had very close calls — very close — over the 40-plus years of CF-18 demos. Eventually the process, training, and supervision became very professional and rigorous, but back then, not so much.
Remember the kindergarten exercise where the first child is given a saying, then whispers it to the next child, and so on, until six kids later the saying has completely changed? It’s called the Telephone Game. That original script gets changed as it moves from one child to the next, until it no longer resembles what they started with. Our CF-18 air show story was very much like the Telephone Game.
Our original CF-18 demonstration came from McDonnell Douglas test pilot Pete Pilcher, who flew the first air show in Cold Lake in the fall of 1982. I was a young lieutenant sitting in the grass at Cold Lake, astonished to see what a Hornet could do during an air show. Our first demo pilot was Bob Wade, an instructor at 410 Squadron. Bobby flew a brilliant air show, built from what he’d learned from McDonnell Douglas, and passed it on over the years to other pilots.
Back then, the Telephone Game was very much at play, with our air show demonstration passed on from one year to the next, from one pilot to the next. It seems impossible now that we, as an air force, didn’t exercise control over the demonstration pilots — to ensure they knew absolutely everything about the numbers they were flying, the safety margins to honour, and, at a minimum, had manuals to pass from one year to the next to keep everyone educated on how to fly safe air shows. But we were too young in the CF-18 world to have that kind of rigor and discipline. It was word of mouth, and we were very much playing the Telephone Game, with Bobby Wade as the original script we were meant to learn from. Not many years later — certainly 3 years after when I was selected as the CF-18 demo pilot — we had strayed from that original script.
As archaic as this story sounds to people, the same effect exists today, even with the F-35 demonstration. I created the first demo and flew it in public for the first time at the 2017 Paris Air Show. Once back home, I taught the first military service demonstration pilots, lecturing them on the hows and whys of the routine so they would know all that I, and our Lockheed Martin engineering team, had learned.
Yet the routine has changed over the years — the script passed from one demo pilot to the next — until much of it hardly resembles what I originally created. My intent was to ensure every demonstration pilot knew the numbers, the truth data, so they would never risk their lives, the jet, or the civilian population watching.
In my day, we made mistakes, and God looked down at us fools and gave us a pass. We didn’t understand the big picture, and we essentially flew our shows the way any line fighter pilot would — flying the numbers without knowing the flight control system, where those numbers came from, or the real safety margins they were built on.
Years later, as a company test pilot, I flew a very different show — one that highlighted aircraft performance rather than displaying or recruiting, as military demo pilots do. I had different margins, extracted maximum performance out of the jet, and had less “fluff.” My demo wasn’t better than the military routines — just different.
There is no perfectly safe way to fly air show demonstrations. You’d think older company test pilots would be safer than younger, more exuberant military pilots, but history shows that isn’t the case. Accidents in company demonstrations are still caused by pilot error, just as in the military demos. We are all still vulnerable to the same human effects and the same human mistakes.
So what does that mean? As I’ve said in previous posts, and leading into some of my own lessons learned — we still learn the hard way, from mistakes.
And this year, we’re in a real streak of pilot willful violations, failure to follow flight profiles, a lack of discipline, and a lack of leadership. Back then, we were naive — we didn’t know any better. Now, we know better, and yet we’re making the same mistakes anyway.
Either way, trouble is coming. I can smell it.
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