RAAF Roulette Display Team mid-air today – pilots safe

Thread succesfully shunted into a siding… 😀

Oh dear … I had no choice your honor (note the deliberate spelling error) … I had to log in.
Off with you Mr Patterson .. off to Mornington Crescent or some similarly complex destination

… Who knows, I might even get to LordoftheRingsLand one day…

STOP THE PRESSES…MR. TWEED ISSUES SARCASTIC REBUKE TO DWARF LIKE GARDEN TROLL…FULL STORY TO FOLLOW…END

Hi Gnome.
I get about. All sorts of odd corners of the Commonwealth. Who knows, I might even get to LordoftheRingsLand one day…

Hi John,
Fair nuff. I’m not an expert on current aviation, but I don’t think the Roulettes travel overseas. Have a look at: http://www.defence.gov.au/raaf/roulettes/

CT4E’s, really… I remember the Chubby Checker’s real days in CT-4B’s, piston engines! Then they struggled to do a loop, and made it all the more worthwhile…. None of yer turboprops in them days. Plus we had to eat brown bread and walk five miles in the snow to see them.

Of course no-one outside of NZ has heard of the Red Checkers, despite their huge fame and admiration here. Let’s just say they were/are the most amazing, highly skilled formation aerobatics pilots in the world. They are the only team to still do the actual mirror formation, which was so unsuccessfully done by the Blue Angels in the 1980’s….

They don’t get around much these days though like they used to. I loved summer lunchtimes at RNZAF Wigram, every day they practised, every lunchtime an airshow for us baggies. I’ll never ever forget the day two collided, one’s aerial gashed the other’s canopy in the mirror manouvre. Talking to the engineers on PTS later they all said the prop of one must have been dangerously close to cutting the other open. Yikes. Never happened in an airshow yet, thankfully. And all was ok, no-one hurt.

I have a brilliant documentary from about 1985/86 following the team through a season. I later got to meet and work with some of those pilots. I remember the 1992 Checkers were unofficially (at their own volition) called the Brown Checkers on base because three of the five were Maoris. They did a brilliant display over a cricket match I was at on Lancaster Park in 1992, and the rest of the crowd were wondering why we 20 or so airmen were cheering so hard and chanting “Chubby Checkers”, as we were all disguised as civvies.

One theory I have for the reason no-one internationally knows who the Roulletes are is because they don’t seem to travel outside of Aussie, do they? I mean even our two top teams, Kiwi Red and The Roaring Forties, went internatonal, displaying in Aussie often in their time. The Roullettes never even came to NZ.

There was a Roulletes model though, Esci’s MB326 is in their colours from the 1980’s.

At the end of the day, none of them can even come close to the Red-Checkers in their under-powered, leased CT-4E’s !!!

…Turbo ducks for cover…… 😎

TNZ

JDK – what on earth are you doing in Sale? It’s beyond the black stump 😎
This is either the bit where gnome oversteps the mark and gets sent to Coventry or JDK realises the error of his ways and agrees wholeheartedly :rolleyes:

John B – sorry you’d not heard of them. Still, you know about them now. Given that most nationalities are -ah- a bit partisan about their country’s team, and Aus is a long way from anywhere else, it’s not that surprising.

Cheers

I’m very far from nationalistic about teams….My opinions about my former employer’s team would be enough to get me shot….(maybe it’s because I had to set up too many airshows). I’ve seen both US teams as well as the Red Arrows, the Snowbirds, the French and the Italians…I don’t have a clear favorite.
I guess the reason I’ve never heard of the RAAF team is simple geography and possibly I’ve never seen a plastic kit of the PC-9 with RAAF markings…unlike the plane flown by the equally distant Japanese team.

I’ve flown a PC-9…actually the Raytheon T-6 “Texan II”…and think it would be a super formation plane. But I fear I’d miss the speed offered by pure jet teams.
If the RAAF would like to fly me down and let me see a show, I’ll become a huge supporter. 🙂 🙂 🙂

I’m in Sale, Gippsland, Vic, Australia on personal business at the moment. RAAF Sale is the base for the Roulettes, and I saw 5 fly over the town centre yesterday afternoon in formation, and a singleton today. I’d guess they were quite busy with a call to Canberra yesterday (Australia Day – quite important here…)

I can’t comment on the accident, as I don’t know anything, but Sale is very proud of the team, as is Australia. They are a world class display team and their record on accidents is (for instance) better than the Red Arrows of the RAF. (This is not a ‘I’m better than you’ remark, the Reds are very, very good. But the have had more than 1 crash in the last few years…)

John B – sorry you’d not heard of them. Still, you know about them now. Given that most nationalities are -ah- a bit partisan about their country’s team, and Aus is a long way from anywhere else, it’s not that surprising.

Cheers

They were indeed practicing over RAAF East Sale.

Maybe that is a regular move in their display, but I stand by my statement that it looked very dangerous.

Also the report showed yesterdays accident. It was an RAAF video taken from the ground. A wierd manouvre – five aircraft in vic formation upside down at the top of a loop, and the sixth – the one that crashed, comes hurtling up from behind rolling all the way into the formation. It (not surprisingly) touched wingtips with the outside aircraft on the left of the loop.

Do they usually roll an aircraft (solo performer??) into a looping formation in their routine? It looked very dangerous.

Dave – living in Melbourne for 7 seven years I got to see the Roulettes many times and come to respect them highly. They often feature displays with a solo aircraft interacting with the main group and of course they have to practice.
Wasn’t this accident near Sale (say 200/300km east of MEL)? There’s an RAAF base there; I thought I heard they were practicing?

Glad to hear that the pilots are ok.

I saw The Roulettes in action last year at an airbase celebration near Melbourne – great team ! (….. also saw them over the ’04 F1 Grand Prix).

I hope that there is no particular design fault with the PC-9 ?
The Irish Air Corps (IAC) have recently taken delivery of a new fleet of PC-9M’s and plans are afoot to reform the (IAC) Silver Swallows display team …… although it may have a different name.

Wow, they’ve got bees in their bonnets on that forum’s thread Rob.

The very first posting is wrong by the way, the RAAF is not the only Air Force in the world who fly aerobatic teams over cities. The RNZAF display team the Red Checkers does regular performances over cities, and Kiwi Red also used to in their Skyhawks. And the NZ Warbirds Harvard Display Team (formerly known as The Roaring Forties) also displays over towns and cities. It does so over my town every November.

Related thread elsewhere.

Just saw the footage myself,…boy that pilot did eject LOW, didn’t he.
They said 1000 ft.
Yes the other one did fly on normally (ish).

TNZ

The news report I saw didn’t show the second aircraft’s condition. It did appear to regain level flight easily so I doubt it is too bad damaged as such.

The one that crashed is totally destroyed.

Glad to see no-one killed. 🙂

How bad was the PC-9 that recovered and landed?

TNZ

It is low, but I would guess the PC9 has 0/0 seats anyway, wouldn’t they?

The report stated he had minor back injuries but was released from hospital soon after, so obviously no problem with the eject height.

He ejected from 300Meters you can convert that to ft. but still that pretty low.

I hate to admit it but I didn’t even know the RAAF had a team,
and I follow international military avaition rather closely. I’ve seen more than a few teams perform, but this was a surprise.

Am I the only one out there that didn’t know about the team?

Maybe they can do some PR…