Or maybe "Fly It LIke You're Drunk"?

[MIflyer]

Tiger Moth. Some real talent, even though he is crazy.

 

[mikewint]

Agree, eventually, if you ask for it often enough your wish gets granted

 

[Gnomey]

Cool! Though he's completely mad!

 

[MIflyer]

Indeed! And a depressing number of "stunt" pilots have been gathered unto their heavenly reward while performing feats of daring that appeared to be far less exciting and "fraught" than that chap's performance. Tallman, Mantz, Scholl, the French Connection team, the Red Baron Pizza Stearman team, Jan Jones (who I met) just to name but a few.

I wonder about the amount of smoke the engine was making. Seemed like a lot but perhaps it was just the way he was using the throttle. I presume the barn roof was specially reinforced.

In any case, if you saw all that in a movie you would assume it was CGI.

 

[Capt. Vick]

 

[special ed]

Bevo Howard is another very good pilot who eventually met with misfortune. Another, whose name escapes me, was billed as the flying professor. At any rate, I saw his routine twice at airshows. He would use a local ( where ever the show) completely restored to original J-3 and do his performance under 100 feet. He was killed at the very next show after the last time I saw him fly. He was using a J-3 from an owner in Baton Rouge,La, if my memory is accurate, and the cause the investigators said was the stick in the rear cockpit had not been secured in it's socket as the plane was regularly flown with a passenger and the rear stick was just pressed in. Having seen R/C fliers in the 1950s do aerobatics with rudder only models, and having seen how well this show pilot could control the J-3, I wondered why the crash was fatal. I learned that he, indeed, had nearly recovered using only throttle and rudder, but contact with the ground rolled the engine into him.

 

[GrauGeist]

Actually, Paul Mantz was killed while flying a hybrid aircraft for the movie "Flight of the Pheonix" and Frank Tallman inadvertantly flew into the side of Santiago mountain (that overlooked MCAS El Toro) in bad weather.

Both flights (prior to mishap) were relatively routine.

 

[MIflyer]

Yes, that is the point. Art Scholl probably had done at least a thousand spins, too, before his last flight.

Jan Jones used to come down to FL from her home in what I guess was Ohio so she could practice her acro for her shows. She scared the ke-rap out of me one day when I looked up to see what I was sure was going to be a mid-air with a Cessna 152 - fortunately her skill and her airplane's capabilities enabled her to avoid it at the last second.

She was flying to a Memorial Day show and her engine quit. There was a big grass field and apparently she was afraid the mowers would not be able to get out of the way,. So she buzzed the field to warn them, pulled up and and turned to come back. Didn't make it.

It's the easy or routine flights that often seem to be the killers.

 

[special ed]

My late friend always claimed if you flew aerobatics long enough, it would get you. I would point out Bob Hoover (whom he met) and Chuck Yeager are still flying and he would say they haven't flown long enough. He was an incredibly careful pilot, checked out in about 100 aircraft, including sailplanes, float planes and flew formation with CAF. He did take chances driving cars and that's what got him.

 

[MiTasol]

Actually, Paul Mantz was killed while flying a hybrid aircraft for the movie "Flight of the Pheonix" and Frank Tallman inadvertantly flew into the side of Santiago mountain (that overlooked MCAS El Toro) in bad weather.

Both flights (prior to mishap) were relatively routine.

And Franks only serious injury in his 58 action packed years was losing a leg while making Catch 22. NOT from flying but from falling off a motor bike

 

[MIflyer]

Well, why would any of those people get killed while flying if it never killed them before?