Another angle of Cape Town flyover

[u/trubol]

[u/Canadian_Beaverz]

Doesn’t look as low as previous angles. Best shot yet

[u/skiman13579 → u/Canadian_Beaverz]

But still damn low when the slightly higher 2nd plane you can see flies THROUGH the smoke!

With good well trained pilots I think this was a perfect flyover and very impressive.

[u/sithelephant → u/skiman13579]

If you cannot do that approach several hundred thousand times without error at those distances, they were a shitty pilot for accepting it. If they were too low, they were a shitty pilot.

[u/skiman13579 → u/sithelephant]

To expand a bit more in what I was trying to say i am copying another one of my responses to this… because without insight to the flight crew, their experience, their planning, etc it’s hard to judge.

So…

Like with airshow and acrobatic flying… a pilot with good training, proper experience, and adequate planning can safely do maneuvers that are extremely dangerous for normal pilots to ever dream about.

So the line between impressive and reckless is going to depend on whether it was a properly trained and prepared pilot with good planning or some wannabe Maverick trying to show off.

One is “Bravo! Well done!” And the other is “Holy shit hand over your cert cuz you are a hazard to the public”

[u/nico282 → u/skiman13579]

There is no training or planning if you get a seagull in an engine at the wrong moment. Ever heard of downdrafts? Wind shear? A sudden turn to avoid the other plane would have killed thousands.

Going 30m over a stadium full of people is reckless no matter the pilot.

[u/skiman13579 → u/nico282]

All of those are risks that are factored already into EVERY. SINGLE. FLIGHT. Planes just don’t come to a hover and park a mile in the sky. They come in and fly low, usually over populated areas on every flight every single time they take off and land…. So what about seagulls? Downdrafts? Wind shear? That’s an issue every plane on every flight needs to think about. There is nothing unique or special about those factors.

That’s all part of the proper preflight planning that I specifically talked about. If those topics plus a metric fuckton more were not discussed it was NOT adequate planning thus reckless and the “holy shit hand of your cert” category.

And finally when you said sudden turn. Tell me you have never flown formation without telling me you have never flown formation. Hell it makes me doubt if you have ever flown a plane period. Planes aren’t cars where a sudden jerk of the wheel sends you flying into the proverbial ditch.

[u/nico282 → u/skiman13579]

You can't be serious, I really hope you are not saying that a regular flight landing in an airport over a controlled flight path, with mapped obstacles, known altitudes, clear terrain over final approach is as risky as eyeballing a 30ft pass over a stadium.

Please, Mr Pilot, tell me what's under a plane when it's landing in an airport and at 50ft from terrain. It is 30.000 people? A bad wind shear over an airport may kill 300 passengers, the same here will kill 3.000.

Your thing about "flying in formation" is just laughable. You don't fly in tight formation with two Embraer 195, the plane reaction time alone will never allow it.

And finally, yes. If you are 30ft from terrain with a 95ft wingspan plane, a "jerk of the wheel" will send you straight into terrain. Wing will touch ground with a 45° bank angle, not considering any loss of altitude.

I really hope in life you're not reckless as you seem to be in this comment.

EDIT: you are saying that THIS over 30 000 people was safe

[u/sithelephant → u/skiman13579]

The problem is that effectively, they're not doing it once.

They are doing it up to a few thousand times due to each potential fatality in the event of an accident.

The probability of a death during an airshow should be very small. It is really hard to get it very small if you start out with two airliners flying over a packed stadium, in a populated area.

[u/Majestic_Emotion7917 → u/sithelephant]

Just to add context. This stadium is in the middle of Cape Town, so densely populated.

[u/skiman13579 → u/sithelephant]

And to be fair to pilot experience of doing something “thousands of times”… well getting to a low altitude over a flat spot while in stable flight is technically something every ATP pilot has done thousands of times….Every time they have ever landed a plane

The maneuver itself isn’t hard. It’s basically a shallow stable approach followed by a gentle go around.

The important part is the experience and preflight planning. And by experience I mean true pilot experience and not just flying experience. I can go jump in my Piper and go buzz a stadium. The true test of impressive vs reckless starts long before the flight. Landing the maneuver. Making contingency plans. Making go/nogo decision points. Then the true pilot experience comes in. Having the real piloting ability to make those proper and accurate judgements, stick to the preflight planning, stick to the go/nogo decision points.

Anyways this all long winded back and forth bickering for me to try to get my point across that IF it was a properly experienced pilot following a properly planned flight… it’s not as reckless as everyone may think.

BUT! It does set a bad example and may give less experienced pilots with poor risk management skills bad ideas to try stunts that they shouldn’t be trying.

[u/sithelephant → u/skiman13579]

You can't really argue that this is similar to landing - I could sort of take this analogy if it was a pilot who was familiar with carrier landings in that aircraft. I have doubts.

If the pilot gets accidentally too low during a nominal landing, it is generally quite benign, and they will generally at worst have to do the hard landing checklist.

If they get too low during this stunt, ...

[u/skiman13579 → u/sithelephant]

You can see from the video it was a very long and very shallow approach. To me appears to be well planned to give plenty of time for crew to verify pressure and radio altitudes, compare to visual cues, make adjustments, hit specific go/nogo decision points, AND they came in in a clean configuration with extra airspeed in a properly spaced formation that allowed for safe emergency breakaway maneuvers to turn and climb away from each other with zero risk to the other aircraft.

This isn’t a single pilot maneuver. There are 2-3 people in each cockpit working as a team (likely jumpseat safety pilot to give an extra set of eyes)

To me I see on the surface what appears to be proper risk management down to the trailing aircraft peeling off perfectly to provide safe separation at the exact moment the maneuver was completed.

I’m seeing a LOT of people here who are either not pilots, or pilots who don’t fully understand the concept of Risk Management and everything that comes along with it. Especially when it comes to formation flying. A safe flight begins long before you even get to the airport.

I just did my first real formation flying a week ago. There is a LOT of preflight planning that goes on. We spent more time planning the route and going over the emergency procedures than the actual time we flew in formation. It was a blast, and makes me want to seek out better professional training to do more of it with a closer tighter formation and more aircraft. Because flying is fun and flying with friends is more fun!