Industry leader: Air show accidents, while horrific, are rare
Collision of 2 planes in Dallas unusual as safety protocols improve.
The kind of mid-air airplane collision that happened over the weekend at a Dallas air show is rare in the United States and Canada, and in general, air show accidents in those countries tend to be increasingly less common.
The public has been horrified and captivated by social media and spectator videos of the collision of two Commemorative Air Force planes at the Dallas Air Show Saturday that left six people dead.
But the impression such viral videos leave can be misleading, said John Cudahy, president of the International Council of Air Shows.
“Video footage is catnip for broadcast media,” he said Tuesday.
Cudahy said that the accident rate for pilots and crews performing in air shows in the United States and Canada has actually fallen over the last 25 years — and particularly over the last decade.
On Monday, officials identified the six men killed Saturday when a World War Ii-era bomber and a fighter plane collided and crashed in a ball of flames at the Commemorative Air Force Wings Over Dallas show. All six were expe
rienced aviators with years of flight training, including as current and retired airline pilots and retired military pilots.
The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation into why the aircraft were flying at the same altitude and in the same air space, NTSB member Michael Graham said.
The Commemorative Air Force, which put on the show, identified the victims as Terry Barker, Craig Hutain, Kevin “K5” Michels, Dan Ragan, Leonard “Len” Root and Curt Rowe.
All of the men were volunteers, but each had gone through a strict process of logging hours and training flights and were vetted carefully, Hank Coates, the CEO of Commemorative Air Force said at a weekend news conference.
Officials have not publicly identified which of them were piloting the aircrafts.
Hutain, of Montgomery, Texas, had been a commercial airline pilot since 1985. He started flying at age 10 and had logged more than 34,500 flight hours, according to his Linkedin page.
Barker was a retired pilot who had worked for American Airlines and lived in Keller, Texas. He was an Army veteran who flew helicopters during his military service.
Rowe, a member of the Ohio Wing Civil Air Patrol, was a crew chief on the B-17, his brother-in-law Andy Keller told The Associated Press on Sunday. Rowe, of Hilliard, Ohio, participated in air shows several times a year because he loved WWII aircraft, Keller said.
Root, also from Keller, was a pilot and manager for the Gulf Coast Wing of the Commemorative Air Force who worked as a contract commercial pilot, according to his Linkedin page.
Before the Dallas accident, in the last five years, there has been an average of 0.6 fatalities a year. That number includes pandemic years when many air shows — including the show in Dayton, in 2020 — were canceled, which skews the average.
In the last decade, air shows have suffered an average of 1.4 deaths a year from accidents. In the previous 20 years, U.S. and Canadian shows have seen an average of two fatal accidents a year. And in the 35 years between 1988 and 2022, the average was 3.5 fatal accidents per year.
The average number of fatalities has been heading steadily downward, Cudahy said. “The industry takes the safety in our business very seriously,” he said. Air show planners, pilots and performers pore over every accident to glean whatever insight can be won, he said.
“When there’s an accident, the information that is gleaned from it is invaluable in helping us to create programs and processes that at least mitigate some of that risk,” Cudahy said. “That collective effort has done exactly what you would think it’s doing.”
Those reviews have changed safety policies by the Federal Aviation Administration and others. “It’s hard to point to the accidents that didn’t happen because the safety measures are in place,” he said.
Importantly, nobody on the ground was injured in Dallas, Cudahy noted.
After a 1951 accident at a Colorado air show that killed 20 people and injured about 50, the FAA required planes to maintain a distance of at least 500 feet from spectator areas, with greater distances required for higher-speed jets.
Among spectators, there has not been a fatality at an air show in more than 70 years.
“That’s a safety record that we in the industry are very proud of,” Cudahy said, adding: “That’s not to say there isn’t always room for additional improvement. We genuinely are working toward a safety record that regularly has zero accidents a year.”
A spokeswoman for the Centerpoint Energy Dayton Air Show declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation into what happened in Dallas.
While the ages of those who died Saturday was not immediately known, James E. Hall, who was NTSB chairman from 1994 to 2001, said the age of the pilots is an issue that must be reviewed.
The planes need more scrutiny, too, “because like the crews in these situations, the aircraft are much older.”
Graham said investigators are analyzing radar and video footage to pinpoint the exact location of the collision. Debris will be carefully examined, along with audio recordings from the air traffic control tower, pilot training records and aircraft maintenance records, he said.
Neither aircraft was equipped with a flight-data recorder or a cockpit voice recorder, separate devices referred to collectively as the black boxes, and neither were required to have those devices, Graham said.
Although rain was hampering the collection of pieces of the B-17 bomber, Graham said Monday an electronic flight display from the B-17 and a GPS navigational unit from the fighter, both damaged, will be sent to an NTSB laboratory to see if data can be recovered.
He said it’s also possible the NTSB could recommend vintage aircraft install flight data recorders.
The crash came three years after the crash of a bomber in Connecticut that killed seven, and amid ongoing concern about the safety of air shows involving older warplanes. The company that owned the planes at the Dallas show has had other crashes in its more than 60-year history.
A preliminary report from the NTSB is expected in four to six weeks, and a final report will take up to 18 months to complete.
The B-17, a cornerstone of U.S. air power during World War II, is an immense four-engine bomber that was used in daylight raids against Germany. The Kingcobra, a U.S. fighter plane, was used mostly by Soviet forces. Only a handful of B-17s remain today, and are mostly featured at museums and air shows, according to Boeing.