Svenestron:
Not knowing exactly what went through Siegfried’s mind at the time, I prefer to believe he was in no way “caught out there” due to any lack of judgment or planning, but was rather the victim of one of history’s most “inopportune sneezes..”
You're not a pilot, are you Sven? Wait, don't answer that. It's obvious. If you were a pilot, you'd know that even the best of us screw up sometimes. It's a sad fact, but there have been many times in my life have I heard of a particular aircraft accident and thought, "How could that have happened to HIM?!" But eh- it does. And it doesn't mean Hoffman was a bad person or a bad pilot. But he certainly wasn't a "victim" of some wierd and capricious cosmic sneeze. That may sound cold but it's not. He merely messed up and it cost him his life. Yes, it's tragic, but we pilots understand it.
I wonder how many times he had rehearsed that specific little demonstration for those particular cameras? Or, had he done something similar so many times before that he just went ahead and "winged" it (or parts of it)? In such a routine, everything must be thought-out well in advance. As a Bolkow pilot, I cannot imagine how that maneuver could have worked out any differently, given his entry speed and the "radical-ness" of it. I'm sure he knew at the top of that diagonal-loop-roll-RTT-whatever that it was all wrong. He should have been *much* higher.
We who have flown a while have all been there. We put ourselves in a position where our heart is suddenly jammed up in our throats and we go, "Oh, no..." Sometimes we pull off a miracle and squeak out of it. And sometimes we crash and it gets discussed
ad nauseum on internet discussion boards such as this.
As Dennis says, if nothing else Ziggy's accident has generated exactly that sort of thoughtful discussion. It all gets stored in the back of my mind, ready to be recalled and used perhaps (but hopefully not) the very next time my hands touch the controls.