Airshow safety is front of mind again after a season of accidents and close calls. I turn to an old friend, the late Major General Des Barker, SAAF (Ret’d), and his seminal book into display accidents. With an average of 28 display accidents and incidents, 13 display pilots killed per year, this low level environment remains incredibly dangerous.
On Wednesday 23 September, the Royal Canadian Air Force began its transformation to become a 5th Gen fighter force with the first flight of the CF-35 at the Lockheed Martin factory in Fort Worth, Texas. Many, many years in the making, the revolutionary capabilities of the F-35 will soon be in the hands of Canadian fighter pilots. And the rest of the RCAF must change to adapt to this powerful, lethal and survivable platform.
In 1987, I was a 28-year-old flying the CF-18 at the Paris Air Show. McDonnell Douglas who made the Hornet had asked the Canadian Air Force to perform at the Paris Air Show on their behalf and that task was given to me as part of my CF-18 demo season. I was completely under the pressure of it all. I took it to mean I had to fly the Hornet as aggressively as I possibly could to show it off, and my fangs came out. Luckily for me, my Wing Commander stepped in and gave me a very timely lesson in leadership which helped save me from doing anything more dangerous than I already had.
A Polish F-16 demo fatality. A mid-air collision between two USN Growlers during a demo. A Blue Angels F/A-18 beach low pass. A USAF F-35A demo near ground impact. A fatal ground impact of a Hellenic Air Force F-4E. And so many more. Accidents, close calls, pilot errors, and willful violations of regulations and safety protocols. Commanders, Air Bosses, and senior aviators are responsible for the safety of the aviators, their aircraft, and, above all, the innocent civilians who came to watch. What will it take to wake leadership up, to make them step in with clear guidance and enforce strict adherence to safety regulations?
In my lectures about air show discipline, I talk about lessons I learned over the years, some of them the hard way. During my first air show season in 1987, I came within fractions of a second of departing the CF-18 and crashing because I had knowingly violated the flight manual trying to make the Hornet look better to the crowd. I learned a life lesson that day.
I recently joined Cameron Sabet on his podcast, “Cutting to the Case” to talk about performing under pressure in high-risk environments: the preparation, mindset, and execution it takes to survive in the test pilot world — from my transition into the RCAF CF-18 through what it actually takes to test fly at the edge of an aircraft’s envelope. One theme was new territory for me — cognitive overload, and the discipline it takes to manage the extreme cognitive loads that make you both lethal and survivable in a 5th generation F-35. What surprised me is how directly that translates to modern medicine as well as the science of ‘Human Performance’.
These days we’re seeing a troubling streak — willful violations, pilots straying from flight profiles, lapses in discipline and absolute void of leadership. Back in my early air show flying, we were victims of The Telephone Game, and very naive. Today we know better, and we’re making the same mistakes anyway.
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.
Many of my tales about flying have some link to what went wrong — some misfortune, some lucky break. But every now and then, I did something right, and taking my brother flying in a CF-18 Hornet was one of those choice moments.
What is flying in real combat like? What do fighter pilots face when they’re sent into harm’s way? What’s in the heads of the men and women our governments send into a real threat environment? Listen to the interviews conducted by John Waters on his podcast, The Afterburn Podcast, with F-16 pilots from Shaw AFB who flew during Operation Rough Rider over Yemen and then into Iran during Operation Midnight Hammer.
The 3P’s (press, politicians, and public) keep telling Canadians that the next fighter needs to be able to land on dispersed runways. In 100+ years of the Royal Canadian Air Force, that has never once been operational doctrine in Canada. Yet the 3P’s are convinced our jets need to land on Canadian Arctic highways, as if Canada’s north is Scandinavia or Europe, where dispersed highway operations are a real, purpose-built capability. But they never accounted for the logistics of it all.
The myth won’t die. The 3P’s keep pointing to dispersed runway operations — Canadian fighters landing on northern roads, the way you’d see in Scandinavia or across Europe — as another argument for a mixed fleet.
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