It's been a year since…..

Woof! That was an amazing piece of video, to see a plane of that size just dissappear into the trees like that…a few seconds of silence…and then a cloud of smoke and flame comes rolling up from the trees….wild stuff….

I have only ever been present at one air show accident with fatality, here in Denver about 1994/95 when an F-86 flew into a ditch while looping at low altitude…he misjudged his altitude and entered a shallow ditch…all we saw was him go into the ditch…then smoke and flame…lots of folks thought it was part of the show. My stepfather flew with the guy at United Airlines.

Mark

Yeah Warbird UK,

Like the time during that airshow in 1988 they flew the brand new Airbus into the trees at the end of the airstrip on the French border!!!!!!

JH

Yes, there were problems mechanically with the engine & that caused the engine to fail, that is common knowledge, but a quitting engine near an airfield is not generally a life threatening situation to an experienced pilot like Martin, What killed him was a French c**k up of immense magnitude, telling the participants at the briefing that, If you have a problem land on runway XYZ, then allowing public to get onto runway XYZ so that when an emergency happened there was no where for the aircraft to land, that is what caused his death. Not the engine problem!
Having attended two French Air Shows in the past as a ground support unit, I have to say they have been the least professional airside of all the air shows I have been to in Europe (and I’ve been to a few over the years!)

The NTSB should be releasing their report on Tobul’s airplane soon…I would think. Check back on this link to see when they do release the final report

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/AccList.asp?month=11&year=2002

The crash was Nov 10.

JH

Thanks for the correction. I knew somebody with the ‘other’ name and typed it without thinking!
There were many comments made in the aviation press that the forced landing should have been safely made until he was faced with the occupied runway.
mmitch.

Equally there was some disquiet over the mechanical state, lubrication and service history of the Magnetos on Martin Sargent’s Spitfire PL983.

I, like am sure many others, had a picture in my mind at the time of this accident – emergency runway, full of people, a needless loss of life and a Spitfire, the b….y French etc.

Some time on and having seen the full French Accident report rather than the abbreviated report and looking at this dispassionately, the emergency runway was in fact runway 23 at Rouen that runs almost parallel to the main runway 22, some 500 metres apart and staggered forward from the main runway by some 500 metres. That the Spitfire stalled with gear and flaps down on a now extended base leg just 300 metres beyond the ’emergency’ runway 23 axis, some might conjecture that the turn on to finals for 23 would have stalled it. We will never know but we must learn a lesson from this.

Mark

Thanks for the reminder Mmitch. Actually his name was Martin Sargent (scuse spellings – not got it written down to hand) but you’ve got the facts of the case correct.

Not a famous name to many, but he’s flown his Harvard at UK shows for many years before the Spitfire, and he was a very experienced camera plane pilot, giving his Harvard time for a number of pics we’ll be familiar with.

Cheers
James

In the UK we lost Patrick Sergant a couple of years ago. At an airshow in France, trying to land his Spitfire with engine trouble he found the ’emergency’ runway occupied by spectators! Turning away to avoid them he crashed. There was considerable disgust expressed by warbird pilots over it. The highest price.
mmitch.

Here he is at our local airshow a few years ago. He and his plane were the star of the event.