Do airplanes regularly collide where it doesn't end in death? I can't remember many midair collisions where the planes continued flying with minor damage. I see where you're coming from asking for a warning, but I also feel like people should just assume airplane collision = death.
If something happens X happens 90% of the time and Y happens 10% of the time, I think it's safe to assume X, especially where there's little downside to a false positive.
I can't believe I'm linking to the Daily Mail, but it seems to have the most detail, and is more informative than the video alone.
The smaller plane is stated to be a Bell P-63 Kingcobra.
You do know that people all around the world read HN? Being familiar with US-Newspapers and/or Newschannels apart from nyt, (infamously) fox and maybe msnbc isnt that likely.
Daily Mail is not a US newspaper (it is from the UK) and I'm not from the US. And yes, I "know" the sort of people who frequent HN and I can only assume most others here do so as well given that this is one of the places where we discuss our ideas. Also, HN is a US site and tends to have a fairly strong US bias given that it is - or at least was - targeted at the Silly Valley startup crowd.
My best guess based on the video is that the P-63 pilot had been high and out of position in formation, and tried to get back in position using both geometry and speed. He may have recognized that he had too much closure and wasn't in position to safely underrun the B-17, and tried to bank and pull to get safe lateral separation, inadvertently putting himself into a blind lead turn where he wouldn't be able to see the B-17 through his wing or fuselage. The blind lead turn is an incredibly dangerous maneuver in formation flight--typically prohibited in military air combat training--for obvious reasons.
Seems the opposite to me, but I'm no pilot. The smaller plane was making a banking left turn. Even if the B17 we're visible on the lower right side of the cocokput, the pilot was probably looking to the left where they were headed.
Or not? It's in a banked left turn, and since it was a collision course, the B17 would have been "under" him out of view. I would not complete the maneuver if I couldn't see it though, so who knows.
Disagree. This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen here in recent months. It's tragic, yes, but also fascinating -- and not just in a rubbernecking way.
I didn't know B-17s were still airworthy, and you don't hear about planes crashing into each other often, even at airshows. As someone casually interested in aviation, I would very much like to hear analysis about how this could've happened, etc.
A disproportionate amount of the best hardware and firmware engineers I know have pilots licenses and are very interested in the mechanics and technical details of flight. Seems perfect for HN.
Seriously doubt any firmware was involved as these aircraft would be manually operated, but I could be wrong. Mechanical malfunction or pilot error would more likely be the cause. Sorry for the loss of life in any case.
How is any of that related to a video showing 6 people dying? This is, literally, like saying you’re into cars, so you watch fatal car crash videos. Sounds like complete nonsense. It’s been flagged to death, so the sentiment wasn’t shared.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
It's the kind of thing you probably wouldn't hear about on TV news unless you were in that same geographical area. It's interesting not because it's a disaster but because of the engineering and (presumed) avoidability involved... the "what went wrong?" angle.
