Seconds before impact...
The Galloping Ghost Plane Crash at Reno Air Races
(Friday, September 16, 2011)
The Reno Air Races, also known as the National Championship Air Races, take place each September at the Reno Stead Airport a few miles north of Reno, Nevada. Air racing is billed as 'the world's fastest motor sport' and Reno is one of the few remaining venues. It is the only air race of its kind in the United States. Planes at the yearly event fly wingtip-to-wingtip as low as 50 feet off the ground at speeds sometimes surpassing 500 mph. Pilots follow an oval path around pylons, with distances and speeds depending on the class of aircraft.
At left, Jimmy Leeward taxis his P-51 Mustang for take-off on Friday. The vintage Second World War-era fighter plane crashed into the grandstands during the popular annual Nevada air show, killing at least nine people, injuring more than 90 spectators and creating a horrific scene strewn with body parts and smoking debris. The plane, flown by the renowned 74-year-old air racer and movie stunt pilot, suddenly spiraled out of control and appeared to disintegrate upon impact. The plane hit the first few rows of VIP box seats like a missile cutting a crater roughly 3 feet deep and 8 feet wide...shooting debris into the stands. Bloodied bodies were spread across the area as people tended to the victims and ambulances rushed to the scene. A festive day of vintage-aircraft racing turned into a scene of deadly horror. The additional deaths were announced at a briefing by the National Transportation Safety Board, which began its investigation into the incident that shook the air racing world.
One spectator who attended the races writes, "Well, you have probably have heard about the tragedy at Reno this afternoon. I was there with Randie and together were eyewitnesses to the disaster....It was on the last race on the fourth lap of the heat on a great flying day in pleasant winds of about 6 knots right down the runway. Johnny Leeward from Ocala, FL was flying "The Galloping Ghost", a race modified P-51. When he rounded the last pylon out of the "Valley of Speed" to go parallel to the runway, his plane was in the usual high-G knife edge turn. Only this time he pitched up into a high-speed arc towards the stands. This was towards us and I had told Randie that something is wrong. As he arched up, I could see the airplane was pitching a little, like an accelerated stall, and he rolled left towards us to inverted and began to come straight down, only he was pulling very hard and angled away from us (we were in the second section of the GA admission area) so I told Randie he was going to miss us. But, it was an impossible maneuver as he accelerated downward and appeared to try to pull out at the same time because all I saw was elevator from the side view. This all seemed like a long time, but was probably only five seconds or so. When he hit, he was at about a 20 degree angle from vertical away from the grand stand structure and accelerating as like silver lightening hitting the ground into the box seats arrayed on the flat tarmac. On impact, there was no explosion or bang: it sounded like a rock landing on concrete as a thud then the near silence of the sound of debris splaying across the asphalt. People who were mere feet west of the point of impact were showered with atomized fuel that surely would have burned them if there had been a fire. But, there wasn't one somehow. Everyone who was at the point of impact (box seating was maybe 50% occupied) just looked as if they disappeared as chairs and tables went flying from the shrapnel from the impact. At the impact quadrants, it sprayed through the crowd as far as right in front of us at about 150 feet. We were behind the impact radius and above it and received no shower of debris. Others fared far worse though, depending on how far away they were. A person in the box seats in front of us collapsed and was being given CPR while someone from his box clutched a young boy running from the scene in panic. People everywhere were dumbfounded. The entire area was littered with very small pieces of the plane no bigger than a finger. The biggest piece of the plane that I could see was an engine part and a landing gear leg. Everything was nearly impossible to identify as what seconds before was a three ton airplane.
The race was called right then and the fire trucks rolled in. It was obvious it wasn't just an an airplane crash, but a mass casualty event. People were laying everywhere and others were flooding into the area to help out until the responders had gotten organized and began to create a triage protocol. The men mostly just sat there as it was really hard to believe and the women sobbed amid the sirens from the ambulances that were moving in.I have no idea what exactly happened here. But what I did see was a man with an airplane fighting for his life. A two handed, full-power, feet on the panel struggle that surely had no possible good outcome. I have watched events such as air shows, Reno, and Red Bull for 40 years and have never seen anything as bad as this go so wrong as fast as this.
I was lucky, though if this had continued for another second, I could have been on a gurney or in the morgue and I have some guilt that I walked away from this so lucky. But, aviation may not come out so well from this. Everyone knows that this is the last place on earth that a pilot can come and do things like this whether with an O-200 formula racer working a blue collar job or with millions and lots of guts to race something like Strega or Rare Bear at nearly 500. RARA may not survive this. The pilots accept the risks, but the public didn't sign up for this and the Fed's won't be happy as they signed on to this as well while the news media demands coup while they count the dollar bills they make from the victims toe-tags photos. We like to think that aviation is safe with risks mostly mitigated with regular maintenance, training, and good equipment. What happened here today is an aberration. When anyone asks you about this, tell them what you know, which isn't much right now and tell them that tens of thousands of flights land perfectly each day."Can you imagine what it was like? One account describes..."The noise was "hellish," a "big crunch," followed by stunned silence and then screams. The smell was acrid, spilled aviation fuel and burnt oil. And the sight was enough to keep Gerald Lent awake for more than 24 hours...The massive plane falling from the sky directly toward him. The cloud of shattered tarmac and razor-sharp shrapnel. The body parts. The first responders. The dazed survivors at a storied air show that careened from festive to deadly in seconds."
Jimmy Leeward (of Ocala, Fla.) in 2010 with his P-51 Mustang fighter plane he named "The Galloping Ghost."
Early in the day, Joshua Cross, an 18-year-old from Pomona, Calif., bought a red T-shirt with a picture of the plane he was most excited to see: the Galloping Ghost. The college freshman's father is a private pilot, and he's been coming to the Reno races since 2007. He especially loves the souped-up vintage planes. "You see the planes race, and you love them," he said. At last year's races, he recounted, the Galloping Ghost, piloted by the colorful Jimmy Leeward, tore past the competition in its first race and walloped the rest of the field in its second. It was supposed to compete against some of the event's fastest aircraft in its third, but weather got in the way, and the race was canceled. This year, Cross was rooting for the Galloping Ghost to soar past Strega, a repeat event winner. "Now I can't believe that plane almost killed me." During Friday's race, Strega was in the lead, Cross recalled. Voodoo was second. The Galloping Ghost, or plane No. 177, was next. The planes whipped around a turn and then started blasting down a straightaway at speeds of at least 400 mph. Suddenly, the Galloping Ghost pulled up. Pilots normally pull up when they're in trouble, flying skyward and away from the competition.
Gerald DeRego, a retired Air Force pilot, who was sitting in the box seats Friday commented that the higher the altitude, the more options that pilots have for maneuvering, but they usually do it in a much smoother manner than Leeward did. The 63-year-old who lives in Penn Valley, has been coming to the Reno races for the last 15 years, and knew something was wrong. The Ghost reached its apex and started to roll. To the untrained eye, the roll resembled an aerobatic move called a Split S, but to DeRego, the pilot had lost "elevator authority" and control of the plane. "As soon as he rolled, I knew he was going to hit the crowd somewhere," he said. "Clearly at that point there was no possible way he was going to survive that. I could see the airplane coming. He was in a steep dive...Is he going to hit before us, on us or after us?" DeRego got up to run with the others around him, knocking down chairs in their path. As the nose came down at a steep angle, the plane rotated a bit, enough to likely spare a number of onlookers, but it still slammed into an area about 100 to 150 feet away from DeRego. The shock wave knocked DeRego down. He landed on another spectator. And then, he said, he started crawling, "like a lizard on a hot rock."
Witnesses said they saw a part fall from Jimmy Leeward’s plane seconds before it pitched up and then straight down into the spectator area. Photographs showed a piece of the tail missing just before the crash. The "elevator trim tab," helps pilots keep control of the aircraft. Modifications had been made to the plane made to make it fly faster without a bigger engine. Leeward said major changes were made to the plane before this year's race. His crew cut 5 feet off each wing and shortened the ailerons — the back edge of the main wings used to control balance — to 32 inches, down from about 60 inches. The Mustang’s aerodynamics are so advanced that it proved to be supremely adaptable to the demands of contemporary air racers. According to one critic, the changes that Leeward ordered up for his Mustang, were inspired by the Reno show’s rubric, “Always remember to fly low, fly fast and turn left,” meant that he was pushing the limits of what an airplane of this vintage could manage. Even one minor glitch and the machine could wrench itself out of his control.
Leeward's plane had a minor crash almost exactly 40 years ago in Reno after its engine failed. The National Transportation Safety Board report on the Sept. 18, 1970, incident says the engine failed during an air race and crash-landed short of the runway. Much of what the NTSB already knows can be traced to Tim O'Brien, a Grass Valley resident on assignment at the races for The Union newspaper. O'Brien, who has been photographing the Air Races since 1973, said he was shooting the races with his brother, Brian, and stood 300 yards away from where the plane made impact. His photos of the aircraft as it crashed made the front pages of world wide news coverage. O'Brien said that when they looked at the photos they noticed the missing trim tab on the plane's tail, and the fact that his helmet was visible deep into the cockpit. The pressures on the pilot's body were likely in excess of eight G's, could have caused the pilot, 74-year-old Jimmy Leeward, to lose consciousness during his dramatic pull up. One of O'Brien's most breathtaking shots shows the aircraft looming above the crowd moments before impact. You can't see the pilot! Officials said they have heard reports the pilot sent a mayday call before crashing, but so far there is no evidence of a call. Investigators also said they'll be looking at the health of Leeward. Friends say the owner of the Leeward Air Ranch Racing Team was in excellent health. His website says he had flown more than 120 races and served as a stunt pilot for numerous movies, including “Amelia” and “The Tuskegee Airmen.”
Aerial view of Reno Stead Field and the crash site.
Many years ago when we attended one of the air races I marveled at how precise and fast the planes flew, under the control of skilled, brave pilots. In a matter of seconds a slight miscalculation, or malfunction can change everything. I found myself silently saying a prayer for them. And now I pray that all those who suffer and have lost so much during this tragedy be comforted and healed.
