Air Show, Fatal Accident
Overhead, jet fighters of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, the Navy's Blue Angels and the Royal Air Force's Red Arrows performed dramatic aerial acrobatics. Tragically, on the last day of the show, the Thunderbirds experienced their first fatal crash at an air show. Major Joe Howard, flying Thunderbird 3 (Phantom F-4E s/n# 66-0321) experienced a loss of power during a vertical maneuver. Although Howard ejected as the aircraft fell back to earth from about 1,500 feet (460 m) tail first and descended under a good canopy, winds blew him into the blazing crash site.
Another death occurred one day earlier during a sport plane pylon race, when during a turn about a pylon a trailing aircraft's wing and propeller hit the right wing tip of a leading aircraft. The right wing immediately sheared off the fuselage, and the damaged aircraft crashed almost instantly, killing the pilot, Hugh C. Alexander of Louisville, GA. He was a professional Air Racer.
The third, and first chronologically, accident involved a kite, i.e., a variety of hang glider. The aircraft suffered a structural failure and collapsed, killing the pilot.
Transpo Trade/Airshows were planned as recurring events here. Since these fatalities, there have been no other airshows at Dulles International Airport.
Read more about this topic: Transpo '72
Famous quotes containing the words air, fatal and/or accident:
“He who will one day teach men to fly will have displaced all boundary stones; the boundary stones themselves will fly up into the air to him, and he will rebaptize the earth—as “the weightless.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Italia! oh Italia! thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)