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Post Info TOPIC: What a picture....FAWK!!!


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What a picture....FAWK!!!
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baad81ff-035c-4352-89a1-a28c624d33e0.jpeg

 

RENO, Nev. (AP) As thousands watched in horror, a World War II-era fighter plane competing in a Nevada event described as a car race in the sky suddenly pitched upward, rolled and did a nose-dive toward the crowded grandstand.

The plane, flown by a 74-year-old veteran Hollywood stunt pilot, then slammed into the concrete in a section of VIP box seats and blew to pieces in front the pilot's family and a tight-knit group of friends who attend the annual event in Reno.

"It absolutely disintegrated," said Tim O'Brien of Grass Valley Calif., who attends the races every year. "I've never seen anything like that before."

Three people were killed and more than 50 injured amid a horrific scene strewn with smoking debris.

Authorities say it appears a mechanical failure with the P-51 Mustang a class of fighter plane that can fly in excess of 500 mph was to blame. Some credit the pilot, Jimmy Leeward, with preventing the crash from being far more deadly.

Leeward was among those killed.

"If he wouldn't have pulled up, he would have taken out the entire bleacher section," said Tim Linville, 48, of Reno, who watched the race with his two daughters.

Left in its wake were bloodied bodies spread across the area as people tended to the victims and ambulances rushed to the scene. Video of the aftermath shows a man with his leg severed at the knee.

The National Championship Air Races have been deadly before. Two pilots died at the event in 1994. And organizers softened two of the curves pilots negotiate after two more pilots crashed into nearby neighborhoods in 1998 and 1999.

In 2007 and 2008, four pilots were killed at the races, prompting local school officials to consider barring student field trips to the event.

Planes at the yearly event fly wingtip-to-wingtip as low as 50 feet off the sagebrush at speeds sometimes surpassing 500 mph. Pilots follow an oval path around pylons, with distances and speeds depending on the class of aircraft.

Mike Houghton, president and CEO of Reno Air Races, said at a news conference hours after the crash that there appeared to be a "problem with the aircraft that caused it to go out of control." He did not elaborate.



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Auger in.

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I started ophph with nuthin, and I can safely say I have most of it left....
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Uke


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Local guy was one of those killed. First time visit... His brother convinced him to attend! Strange karma...

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Uke


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Meanwhile the numbers of those killed has climbed ta nine!

Death toll climbs to 9 at Reno air race

 
Debris flies and the crowd scatters as the P51 Mustang airplane crashes into the edge of the grandstands Friday at the air race in Reno, Nev.
 
Debris flies and the crowd scatters as the P51 Mustang airplane crashes into the edge of the grandstands Friday at the air race in Reno, Nev. / Photos by WARD HOWES/Associated Press

RENO, Nev. -- Federal officials were in Reno on Saturday, investigating what caused a 74-year-old pilot to lose control of his World War II-era plane and crash at a Reno air race on Friday, killing himself and eight spectators and injuring at least 50 others.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Terry Williams said it's too early to say what caused the crash. Event organizers have suggested a mechanical problem.

As thousands watched in horror, the P51 Mustang suddenly pitched upward, rolled and nose-dived toward the crowded grandstand, slamming into the tarmac and blowing to pieces.

It appears that the deaths and injuries were caused by flying parts of the plane.

"It came down directly at us. As I looked down, I saw the spinner, the wings, the canopy just coming right at us. It hit directly in front of us, probably 50 to 75 feet," said Ryan Harris of Round Mountain, Nev. "The next thing I saw was a wall of debris going up in the air."

Left in its wake were bloodied bodies spread across the area as people tended to the victims and ambulances rushed to the scene. Video showed a man with his leg severed at the knee.

Veteran Hollywood stunt pilot Jimmy Leeward died in the crash. Initially, authorities said three spectators had died, but Saturday, they revised that number, saying seven had died on the tarmac and two others died later at hospitals.

Before Friday, 17 people had been killed at the National Championship Air Races since their start in 1964, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported. Friday's crash was the first time spectators were killed or seriously injured, the newspaper said.

Tim O'Brien of Grass Valley, Calif., was photographing Friday's races when the crash occurred. He said the P51 Mustang was racing six other planes when it pitched violently upward, rolled and headed straight down.

From the photos he took, O'Brien said it looked like a piece of the plane's tail called a "trim tab" had fallen off. He said he believes that's what caused the plane's sudden climb.

Meanwhile, the pilot of another World War II-era plane, a T28 aircraft, was killed Saturday when his plane crashed at the Thunder Over Blue Ridge air show in Martinsburg, W. Va.

Media reports said the unnamed pilot apparently lost control during a six-plane stunt formation and crashed on the runway. Officials said no one on the ground was injured.



-- Edited by Uke on Sunday 18th of September 2011 12:02:07 AM

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Add one more...

September 19, 2011 11:44 AM

Air race crash's death toll up to 10 in Nev.

Updated at 1:53 p.m. ET

 

 

RENO, Nev. - A 10th person died overnight from injuries suffered Friday in the nation's deadliest air racing disaster, a crash that also sent about 70 people to Reno-area hospitals.

Saint Mary's Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Jamii Uboldi said Monday morning the patient who died was male, but she couldn't immediately release his name, age and hometown.

Strangers united to help air race crash victims
Air race crash plane a "missile on steroids"
Air race safety questioned after Reno crash

 

Also Monday, the names of two more victims were released. Washoe County medical officials say 53-year-old Regina Bynum, of San Angelo, Texas, and 47-year-old Sharon Stewart, of Reno, were among the 10 people who died.

Officials have yet to identify three of the dead. Pilot Jimmy Leeward was among those killed.

Amid the horrific aftermath of the crash, a sort of calm pervaded.

Witnesses were spattered with blood and pieces of flesh, yet video of the scene shows paramedics, police and spectators attending to the wounded with a control that seems contradictory to the devastation.

 

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Speaking from his hospital bed at Northern Nevada Medical Center in Sparks, Nev., Noah Joraanstad, a 25-year-old commercial airline pilot from Anchorage, Alaska, told CBS' "The Early Show" Monday that the plane sounded like "a missile on steroids."

"It just hit so violently and I kind of, at the last second, closed my eyes and just hoped and prayed, and it just kind of threw me across the ground and, right after that, I got up and ran on adrenaline for a couple of seconds," Joraanstad told "Early Show" co-anchor Chris Wragge.

Joraanstad, covered in aviation fuel, was burned severely in the crash. Shrapnel tore into his back, narrowly missing his lung and kidneys.

"This happened so fast, there was just a sense of shock. But people were very calm. You know, they didn't know me. They came, held my hand, told me I was going to be all right," Joraanstad told The Associated Press. "They walked into a scene where people were amputated, whatever, and just carnage everywhere, and they decided to help. To me, those were the real heroes."

As NTSB investigators combed through the wreckage during the weekend, officials said they may be close to finding the cause, CBS News correspondent Karen Brown reports.

The tail is key because photos show that, just seconds before the plane plummeted to the ground, a piece of the tail section was missing -- something that could have caused the pilot to lose control.

Officials and those in the tightly-knit air racing community credit not only a detailed plan for just such a crash, but the type of people at the event: pilots, veterans and others accustomed to dealing with a high-pressure situation.

Doctors, nurses and military veterans from the crowd volunteered their services to emergency crews, said Reno Fire Battalion Chief Tim Spencer, a 29-year veteran who has worked at the air races for 27 years. Those without medical skills helped firefighters transport the injured.

"It wasn't uncommon to see one firefighter and three people in civilian clothes carrying a litter to the proper area" for evacuation, Tim Spencer said. "Everybody pulled together perfectly and worked side by side."

Video: Reno plane crash perhaps due to broken tail: NTSB

Such cooperation helped save Ed Larson, one of the victims cut down by a wall of shrapnel kicked up when the Galloping Ghost, a souped-up WWII-era P-51 Mustang fighter plane, crashed into the VIP section Friday, disintegrating over a two- to three-acre area.

Metal fragments and wreckage hit Larson, 59, in the head and back and legs, shredding his calf and severing his Achilles tendon. He was knocked unconscious but came to as he was being loaded on a transport helicopter.

"All I saw was a real coordinated effort," Larson said from a wheelchair at Renown Regional Medical Center, which handled 36 of the most severely injured patients, including two who died.

The carnage left even seasoned emergency room surgeons and rescue workers shaken.

(At left, watch the terrifying pictures in a "CBS Evening News" report broadcast Saturday)

"This is the worst I've seen," said Dr. Mike Morkin, the emergency services director at Renown. He did his trauma training at Cook County Hospital in Chicago and helped in the aftermath of Chicago's Paxton Hotel fire that killed 19 people in 1993. Yet he said he had never seen so many patients with such severe injuries at one time.

Paramedics, police and firefighters, hospitals and event organizers had drilled for such a disaster, some just hours earlier.

Emergency workers were quickly putting into practice the skills they'd learned in drills. They separated the wounded depending on the severity of injuries as ambulances and transport helicopters moved in. A Vietnam-era Huey helicopter from a military display was pressed into service to fly victims to the hospital.

"It was triage on the tarmac," said David Edgecomb, 41, a volunteer security guard from Paradise, Calif., who said he saw a man in an electric wheelchair dead in the spectator area. Edgecomb cut strips of bunting from the VIP boxes into strips to be used for tourniquets, while larger pieces of the material were used to cover body parts.

The Rev. Thomas Babu was at St. Michael's Catholic Church four blocks from the airport when he saw the fire engines and ambulances streaming past.

"I thought it was my duty to go there," said Babu, 37.

He held hands and prayed with the family of a woman who had been killed.

"Tragedy brings people together. We become more good human beings when there is something bad happening around us," he said. In an interview with a cable news station on Monday, National Transportation Safety Board member Mark Rosekind said investigators were analyzing the "tremendous amounts of material" collected at the scene and submitted by spectators who photographed and videotaped the crash.

A key focus of the investigation is the tail of the high performance aircraft, which some photos seem to show lost a part before the crash.

"There are a lot of photos of specific aspects of the tail," Rosekind said. "We have found in the wreckage some parts of tail from the accident aircraft. We have those photos."

Gov. Brian Sandoval said some of the air race emergency crews had dealt with victims just two weeks ago when Eduardo Sencion opened fire in Carson City with an AK-47 assault rifle. He shot 11 people before turning the weapon on himself. Four victims died, including three members of the Nevada National Guard at an International House of Pancakes restaurant.

"We've had two incredible tragedies in the last two weeks. We have a lot of heroes here," Sandoval said. "They have been trained and they have been training and today it showed. It paid off."

Deaths from IHOP shooting "hit real hard"
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Michael Houghton, president and CEO of the Reno Air Races, said it took 62 minutes to get all of the injured on their way to area hospitals, a pace of about one each minute.

"They kind of came in waves," said Morkin, the Renown hospital ER director. "You're just running from one patient to the next. You stabilize one ... and you go to the next patient."

Some lost limbs, others had severe facial wounds. There were many patients with broken bones or lacerations. Two of the patients in critical condition had massive head injuries.

Yet it could have been far worse, officials said as the National Transportation Safety Board investigated what went wrong at the National Championship Air Races afternoon.

The plane crashed at the edge of the crowd, narrowly missing the grandstand where thousands more people were watching. Spectators were sprayed with aviation fuel, but the plane did not explode, and its fuel did not catch fire.

Ken Liano, a structural engineer and aircraft consultant, was surprised the plane didn't explode into a fireball, as was the case in a fiery accident a day later at a West Virginia air show that killed the pilot but did not harm spectators.

"I guess God was on the people's side," Liano said.

© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.



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