Airshow Safety – When is the Next Accident?

I remain dismayed by the steady drumbeat of bad news from the airshow world — close calls, near ground impacts, and, too often, fatalities. From the one-of-a-kind Turkish F-4 near miss, to incidents involving military jets in North America, to the fatal loss of a Polish F-16 demo pilot earlier this year, the pattern doesn’t break.

I lecture on airshow safety, and I’ve started to feel like a broken record, because the mistakes and the willful violations keep happening. It’s true that many airshow veterans — myself included — have made our own bad calls and learned hard lessons the hard way. But that history doesn’t excuse what’s happening now. Demo pilots aren’t being helped by an absence of leadership, coaching, or systemic re-blueing to ground them back to fundamentals. And they certainly aren’t helped by the public and by politicians who, with stunningly idiotic enthusiasm, encourage willful violations of safety margins. No one is made safer by that. The risk to aircrew and to civilians on the ground keeps climbing. This is a serious problem.

Airshow organizations have always tried to help. The International Council of Airshows holds a safety session at its annual conference each December in Las Vegas. The European Airshow Council runs a safety day for demo pilots flying overseas. Boeing has been running a superb re-blueing program for U.S. Navy demo pilots for years — and the Boeing F-15EX demo pilots in recent years gave a brilliant review of their development program and the safety margins they built in.

I created the F-35 demo program from the ground up. I drilled discipline into the early military demo pilots so that no one could get themselves hurt — and built in safety margins for all maneuvers so that no pilot could ever come close to hurting himself or the jet. Safety was built into the program’s DNA to protect every demo pilot who came in the years after.

In spite of all our efforts, the near-misses and accidents keep happening, somehow slipping past every one of these guardrails.

So what’s next? At the rate the near-misses are piling up, it feels like a catastrophic event is close. What do we actually do about this? I wish I had an answer beyond railing about it. What I do know is: if you think safety is expensive now, wait until you have an accident.