Originally Posted by
gums
The Cochran deal is confusing, as I am sure I saw the Blues quit the show after the initial takeoff when the 4-ship went into their intitial move. It was prolly at Houston in the fall of 95 but I gotta check. I was there for a family event and took my brother and Dad to the show at Ellington.
Donnie had a rough tenure as skipper of the Blues. A couple of shows were so bad in 1995 that the team went back to training mode and canceled performances.
The Mesa show March 25-26, 1995 apparently was cut short after safety concerns and a pilot change was made in one of the positions.
During the September 23-24 show at NAS Oceana, Virginia Donnie lined up on the wrong runway on a multiple plane opposing pass (perhaps the Delta Vertical Break). He grounded the team once again but they were apparently flying again by the Houston show October 21-22, 1995.
From the
Baltimore Sun:
Blue Angels to return to the skies Daredevil team's leader had suspended shows after maneuvering error
October 05, 1995|By GILBERT A. LEWTHWAITE | GILBERT A. LEWTHWAITE, SUN NATIONAL STAFF
WASHINGTON -- The Navy's Blue Angels yesterday ended an unusual suspension of their daredevil demonstration program, caused by the team commander's concerns over his own flying performance and risks to the other pilots.
Cmdr. Donnie Cochran, 41, decided to take his team back into intensive training after he lined up above the wrong runway during a high-speed, low-level maneuver at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach, Va., on Sept. 23.
The Blue Angels have not performed since, but yesterday after a final training session decided to resume their schedule of seven more performances this year, starting in San Francisco this weekend.
One of the team's regular performances is over the Naval Academy in Annapolis during Graduation Week in May.
Each Blue Angel maneuver involves a series of procedures that have to be performed in precise sequence and with split-second timing.
At each show the pilots choose local landmarks as "marks" from which to stage their maneuver. In pilot terminology, Commander Cochran has had trouble "hitting his marks."
"He did make some mental mistakes in the show, mistakes which alarmed him and which caused him to terminate the rest of the performance," said Lieutenant Kirby.
At Oceana, one of the heart-stopping maneuvers in front of a crowd of 150,000 required four planes to cross over a single point simultaneously from different directions, using two runways their "marks." Commander Cochran approached the point over the wrong runway.
"The other pilots saw he made that mistake and adjusted to it," said Lieutenant Kirby. "In that particular maneuver was safety impaired? It could have been, but it wasn't necessarily."
The suspension of their public program is their second this year, an unusual, if not unprecedented, setback for an individual team. They initially canceled a March show in Mesa, Ariz., after performance problems involving a pilot who was replaced.
"There are a couple of things going on here," said retired Vice Adm. Tony Less, who commanded the Blue Angels in the mid-1970s. "The first is the leader is very conservative about safety, and justifiably so in that particular environment. When you are flying that close together and that close to the ground, he needs to be.
"It's peculiar to this team that they are canceling shows for that. Has it happened before? Probably not, but maybe there has been a time or two in the past when it should have happened, but they managed to get through."