KenV - without wanting to drift too much, I thought I read that assessing the gate with an erroneous height reference relative to the airfield was the fundamental cause of the F16 incident - do you have another view/insight?
From the article you cited:
"It appears that the pilot reverted back to his Nellis habit pattern for a split second."
The F-16 pilot computed everything correctly and had the correct altimeter setting for this location. And he had performed this maneuver hundreds of times at a lower altitude and could do it by "instinct". For whatever reason his concentration slipped for a split second and he reverted to instinct when he rolled inverted and pulled, from which at this location with a higher ground elevation was not recoverable.
The reason I brought this accident up at all is simple. One poster here insisted with absolute certainty that it was "plainly obvious" from the video that the Hunter pilot was performing a 1/4 clover maneuver, and that the pilot had "obviously" executed it "poorly". So I challenged him (repeatedly) to view the video of the F-16 accident and tell me what was wrong with that loop maneuver. That video showed the maneuver from both outside
and inside the cockpit. He failed to recognize that the maneuver was NOT a loop at all but a split S, which is TOTALLY different than a loop. He ASSUMED the F-16 was performing a loop because he had read it was a loop and despite abundant
very obvious visual evidence to the contrary
and coaching telling him something was not right and to look carefully, he did not see it was
not a loop. All he saw was a loop, because that is what he had read. In the same way, he ASSUMED the Hunter was performing a 1/4 clover because he had read it was a 1/4 clover. But there was no way to know. In other words, he engaged in wild speculation based on what is likely a wildly false assumption.