3/27/2023 0 Comments Leeward island racer![]() "From what I understand he hit 22.5 g's, which no pilot can take," Chiavetta says. By the time he came to, his plane had climbed to 9000 feet.Īndy Chiavetta, who worked with the pit crew of another Unlimited racer, says that according to telemetry broadcast from the Galloping Ghost to Leeward's team, the g load was far higher than that. Pilot Bob Hannah blacked out during the 10 g ascent. Back in 1998, a similar accident struck another P-51 at Reno, Voodoo Chile, during an Unlimited race in 1998. Leeward would have experienced acceleration of at least 10 g's-enough to knock him unconscious. Without it, the Galloping Ghost suddenly lurches into a severe climb. Leeward's plane, the Galloping Ghost, had already completed several laps and was heading for the home pylon in a steep left turn when, the NTSB report says, "witnesses reported and photographic evidence indicates that a piece of the airframe separated." This is the trim tab falling off. The back-and-forth flexing can quickly cause severe metal fatigue think of bending a paper clip back and forth until it breaks. ![]() Pushed out into the high-speed airstream, it's vulnerable to rapid vibration called flutter. To steady the P-51 at full racing speed, the trim tab has to deploy outward nearly as far as it can. Called the "elevator trim tab," this piece, in effect, reduces the elevator's angle of attack and thereby reduces the downward pressure. So, like any pilot in this situation, Jimmy Leeward would have engaged a flap on the back of one of the plane's elevators (the horizontal moving surface on the tail). Keeping the nose down would require constant physical exertion by the pilot. At these speeds, the tail generates enormous downward pressure, and as a result, the nose wants to rise. But for air racing, the planes are heavily modified to maintain speeds near 500 mph. The P-51, the plane Jimmy Leeward crashed a week ago, was designed in the early 1940s as a long-range bomber escort and ground-strike aircraft that could cruise for more than a thousand miles at 360 mph. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play Here's how, and why, we think the accident unfolded: That failure-prone component, combined with a stroke of bad luck, turned a multimillion-dollar racing machine into an unguided missile. The consensus to emerge is that the disaster was the direct result of the failure of a relatively small piece of metal, the elevator trim tab, that had been implicated in a number of similar incidents in the past. To piece together a fuller picture of what exactly went wrong, PM talked with officials, racers, and race crew personnel. Only when that final report is issued will the NTSB make recommendations that may affect future running of the Reno races-or, possibly, cause them to be shut down. While the report revealed little new information of note, it confirmed the most salient details and laid the groundwork for a longer report that will take approximately a year to complete. A week after the catastrophic crash at the Reno Air Races that killed 11 people and injured dozens more, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) today released its preliminary report on the incident.
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