November 13, 2022

MAYBE YOU CAUGHT the footage. On Saturday afternoon at the Wings Over Dallas airshow in Texas, six people were killed in the midair collision of two vintage warplanes, including one of the few surviving examples of the B-17 bomber. Two of the six dead were retired American Airlines pilots. Another was an active Boeing 777 captain for United.

There are a few different videos of the accident, shot by spectators from different angles. You see the smaller plane, something called a P-63 Kingcobra, racing in from behind, nailing the B-17 in the midsection, almost as if it were aiming for it. The bomber instantly splits in half, spewing fragments, then plummets into the ground. As one of those pilots with a morbid fascination with air disasters, I confess to hitting the replay button multiple times.

If you do this, YouTube’s algorithms will send you on a greatest hits tour of previous airshow crashes. Of which there is no shortage. There’s the infamous B-52 crash in 1994, for instance. Or the ghastly footage from 1988 in Rammstein, Germany, when three planes from an Italian aerobatic team collided during a maneuver, sending a fireball into the crowd and killing 70 people. In 2002, 77 people died when a Russian-made Sukhoi fighter cartwheeled into the crowd at a show in Lviv, Ukraine.

Over on Wikipedia, meanwhile, a list of airshow fatalities runs for pages. Among the dozens of listings is a 2018 accident in Virginia that killed a pilot named Jon Thocker, a former colleague of mine who I flew with on numerous occasions.

All of which makes us ask: Has the time come, maybe, to put airshows to pasture? Is it really worth the risk? And is there not something anachronistic about these events? Are that many people still enthralled by the spectacle of planes doing loops and rolls?

Allow me to quote Sideshow Bob, from season seven of “The Simpsons”: “Air show? Buzz-cut Alabamians spewing colored smoke in their wizz-jets, to the strains of “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” What kind of country-fried rube is still impressed by that?”

Fair question.

Still from “The Simpsons,” 1995.

Not me, certainly. I’ve been to a few airshows over the years, but my interest in them is at best halfhearted. On a list of things I’d choose to do on a weekend afternoon, hanging out at an airshow is right up there with cleaning the bathroom. Oh, I might enjoy clambering around the aircraft on static display, but few things bore me more thoroughly than watching aerobatics, be it the Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, Red Arrows, or anyone else. I don’t know if you could pay me enough to attend Oshkosh, the big annual “fly-in” event up in Wisconsin that, for reasons not understood by me, draws hundreds of thousands.

Admitting this makes me feel a bit traitorous. I’m a professional pilot, after all; what’s wrong with me? Is there some visceral thrill I’m somehow immune to? But aviation is a broad field. Different aspects of it appeal to different people. Military aircraft, stunt flying, and so on, has never held my attention. My passion has always been the commercial realm: jetliners. As a kid I put together hundreds of plastic Revell kits of bombers and fighters, it’s true, but it was always the 747s and DC-10s that excited me more.

For that reason, if I were to attend an airshow, make it the one held every two years in Paris. At Le Bourget Airport, the focus is commercial planes. Though even here things can turn deadly. In Paris in 1973, a Tupolev Tu-144 — the Russian Concorde — crashed during a display flight killing the entire crew. This, too, you can watch on YouTube.

Maybe just stick with the static displays. Let kids get their pictures taken next to a B-2 bomber or a KC-10, or in the cockpit of an Airbus. But nix the daredevil fly-by stuff. Instead of risking life and limb, retired pilots can play golf or go fishing.

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