If you watch the video on tw@tter don't read the comments, they'll boil your eyeballs.
Utmost sympathy for those involved but also for the little girl watching, that'll stay with her.

Clearly a spin from a low speed turn, (turnback?) you can see in the video the beginning of the autorotation.

So far as ejection height is concerned, on a Martin Baker seat , non zero zero, you needed, as. a rule of thumb, a minimum height of 10 percent of your rate of descent to compensate for the seat’s rate of descent at the moment. of ejection.

If, repeat if, indeed, it was a turnback following engine failure it shows the reason, certainly when I was a QFI why lowlevel turnback practice was stopped. Ie, if it does not work out, you may well be faced with a low level ejection in a descending aircraft,ie outside the seat’s performance envelope.

Very sad.

Some similarities with the recent Reds crash at Valley, albeit that was a simulated engine failure as I recall.

A very sad day - thoughts and prayers to all touched by this tragedy

Firstly, a tragic accident and all condolences.

Then thoughts turn to aerobatic teams flying obsolescent / largely retired types - pretty common ? Reds are still using legacy Hawks, Blue Angels legacy F18's, Snowbirds....

negative on the command eject. side by side seating. yet another brutal chapter for the RCAF this year. Jenn was the PAO for the CF-18 demo team a bunch of years back. Really nice girl.

I was taught you never attempt a turnback from an engine failure after takeoff. Have things changed?

I would say that throwaway lines like that arent really helpful - lets be honest, investigators havent done their thing yet and you cant know that was what the pilot was doing. and....it is not really true, it would depend on the training, aircraft performance, etc. I have flown for various air forces, about 3/4 of which train and plan for turnbacks depending on the circumstance. there are times where they make sense, and times where they dont.

If you ain't got the smash......
 

….you are going to crash. Speaking as a low-level jet aerobaticist, what were he thinking?....pulling up after take-off (low energy) into a barrel roll and compounding that by losing the roll-rate at the top, just as the picture out the front changed to dire (due to the high terrain they were rolling towards).
I often did some silly things (uncoord garbage rolls at 300ft agl - until I learnt the secret script and thereafter did it confidently), but nothing ever that stupid? You don't even need to hit the buffet to get that eject imperative. But then again, I did leave the ventral speedbrake out during a pitch-up tailslide topping at 3000ft, tried to full-fwd stick recover the vertical, and entered three full turns of an an inverted spin after it fell on its back, so I guess we are all guilty at times of stoopid and thoughtless. During the90 nose-down recovery on that buzz, buffet, judder evolution, I can still see (in my nightmares) whole hordes of spectators below running radially outwards.
Never letting things develop is the secret sauce. Not starting without sufficient smash is the secret saviour. Low and slow or high, slow and face-fulla dirt is formulaically fatal.
Not trying to be smart. I was essentially self-taught.... and soon learnt to stop trying too hard or being in anyway adventurous. An earnest discussion with my CO (who saw that very proximal garbage roll) also helped re-orient my bravado. He was talking to the CAS in front of the O's Mess when he saw the CAS expression change to horror - as he viewed me in the distance over the CO's shoulder. As I said later, on his carpet, "no sweat boss, I'm on top of it now. There's a bit of a trick to it.".

My deepest sympathies to all those touched by this crash.

For now I'm not going to comment on how the aircraft arrived in the position it did. I do however find myself surprised by the video of the ejection. I am very familiar with MB seats and the sequencing thereof but know very little about the seats fitted to the CT 114.

The large smoke plumes and lack of an early seat separation were a surprise to me. I would have expected seats of that vintage to use sequenced charges (or even a single charge) as they moved up the rails and for an immediate drogue deployment with separation occurring as soon as tumbling stopped.

Difficult to accurately assess height and ROD but it looked like a better result should have been obtained.

So the question is, did the seats work as specified? In which case they are probably not suitable for use in the "high risk" environment of a formation display team.

Several have commented on the Snowbirds use of what is essentially a vintage jet for their displays. I am not against that providing the risks are minimised. Lets face it the alternative would probably be a Harvard 2 or disbandment. I wonder if the fitment of something like an MB Mk 8 seat has ever been considered for the Snowbirds CT 114. I know it is available as a retrofit for the T37 which also has (albeit different) a Weber seat.

Perhaps the conversation was along the lines of " we struggle to justify the costs of the Snowbirds as it is, if you insist the current seats are unsafe we will just can the team".

Whatever happens as a result of this accident I hope the Snowbirds continue. I'd love it to be in the CT 114 but I think it will cost money. Hopefully that money can be found.

Well, no. But taking off from runway 09, an ejection straight ahead would have sent the jet to downtown Kamloops. Lots of houses everywhere. I can understand that the pilot was looking for an alternate option and trying to steer the jet away from the inhabited areas.

You really think this was a planned barrel roll after take off on a pairs take off proceeding on a ferry flight with Pax onboard?

I strapped into my first ejection seat equipped aircraft back in 1965. Since then I have NEVER heard any pilot or backseater talk about not ejecting promptly in order to avoid a populated area. Of course normal flight planning tries to avoid flying over houses to reduce noise pollution and/or keep from dropping bombs and stuff in Aunt Maud's back yard, and so on. If there is a town some distance off the end of a runway, I imagine the person writing the departure procedure would take that into account so that a normal departure would include a turn. That is generally the case for both military and civilian flying.
Generally speaking, you don't want to eject unless you have to. It's dangerous, it hurts, and there is a lot of paperwork associated with any ejection. However, when it IS time to eject........... well...... you EJECT and you don't want to waste a millisecond because doing so might get you killed. It's that simple.
And in this case, it looks like the plane actually crashed in somebody's front yard, the pilot ended up on a roof, and the passenger not far away.
The idea of sacrificing yourself on the off chance that you might steer away from a school yard is a myth perpetrated by an uneducated media.

That was painful to watch, my heartfelt condolences to the young lady who lost her life, and my thoughts are with the injured pilot, one wishes you a speedy full recovery, both physically and mentally..

One also wonders how the woman you hear calling him a show off just prior to ejection is feeling and one hopes she too does not have nightmares over it,.

I think the investigation will show that you are correct. Didnt look like one to me. That aircraft and pilot were not part of the show team.

Yep, they're not doing aerobatics as such, more a formation flyover tour of Canada in stages. I assume the deceased was not actually a pilot but a team member, PR as I understand it. Not totally convinced non essential personnel should be flying in these circumstances. Apparently apart from the two spare Tutors they don't have any support aircraft.

The Blues are re-equipping with Super Hornets..

That 'woman' is clearly a young child. Let's hope she doesn't have nightmares.

The flight wasn't part of a flyover.
The team were transitting to another location...

Neither do many other teams...

RAAF Macchi's used to practice EFATO turn backs all the time in my day. I'm not aware that there was ever any crashes from this practice. To me it looks like an EFATO with the speed to height and maybe just got too slow for the turnback, stalled and sadly the end...

The team were conducting a formation transit, a positioning leg. It is common for team members other than aircrew to travel with the formation. All of this information was easily found using google.

I wonder how many turn backs occurred for real (genuine question/curiosity), and also what the height gates for them were in the Macchi. CFS is still teaching turn backs in the PC-21; but with a gate height a lot higher than what was shown in the video. Not to say what's right or wrong, I don't have the experience.

Another thing that is I guess at a glance unique is that the Tutor is not in current active service in the RCAF, unlike flying something like the T-6 or the Hawk (or PC-21/9 in the RAAF) which pilots would have been trained to fly on pilots course, FIC, while at the schools etc. The only Tutor time the crew have is time the pilots presumably have as part of the team; not through any other posting or tour.

Does the Tutor engine have a chip detector?

I'm surprised that a straight ahead climb followed by an ejection wasn't selected. A turn back from that altitude looks impossible to me. Surely such a calculation is routine for every single engine jet takeoff in a military aircraft?

WWW

Why would they pull up like that after what seems a normal TO?

• They planned (or ad hoc decided to do) an aerobatic maneuver which ended badly
• Somatogravic illusion
• Technical problems (control surface, engine,...)
• Health issue (anything from a bee i the cockpit to something else)
• Cockpit management (e.g. PNF took control, made a mistake in the process)
• Trading speed for height in order to eject
• CoG issue (doesn't seem like it)
• ?
  
  It's impossible to say which is true. But they did indeed climb, stall(?), bank so that the cockpit was pointing towards the sky and eject. Could as well be a planned ejection, with an unfortunate outcome.

Probably turning away from the city/river/mountains. Take a look at google earth, its been ages since i flew in there but theres not many places to go to. i dont think he was trying to make the airfield.

Was the video taken from here, across the road?

I had a look at Google Maps of the area around CYKA. An engine failure on takeoff leaves you with the choices of a Domtar pulp & paper mill on the south side of the river, or residential neighbourhoods on the north (and the river straight ahead). None of those options seem particularly good. Perhaps the pilot was at least trying to turn towards the northwest where there's a bit of open space near the airport as well as the golf course.

So to be clear, the Snowbirds don't fly practice EFATO PFLs? If not surely they must brief to only leave above a certain height and speed, not start turning.

All very odd; jet enters what looks like an uncoordinated turn, spins to the right through a full rotation, and seems to briefly (self?) stabilise as the crew leave. No smoke, flame or debris from the jetpipe before the pull-up, no change in engine note that I can hear.

But presumably this training was for conventional single ship take-offs and climb out where you would have had more height to play with (and more awareness of your options) albeit probably less speed?

I guess the investigation will establish whether he could have made the turn if he kept lower/faster, or at least got the a/c pointing back at the airfield or some open space and given him and his PAX a better chance of a survivable ejection. So very sad.

I can hear it, a muffled pop @ :09-10sec. It could also be a car door in the background but it engine trouble is highly suspect.

From PM Trudeau:

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....d77e7028ce.jpg
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....2560a74293.jpg



In this case the pilot came from the C-130 community:

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/ne...lle-nb-448287/

I just listened to a podcast interview with a former Snowbirds CO, and one of the things he mentioned is the lack of luggage space in the Tutor.
Looking at the picture of Capt. Casey in the Tutor there seems to be a duffel bag stuffed on top of her seat. I have seen pics of F-16s with a bag behind the seat, and an F-15E with a big duffel on top of the WSO instrument panel. Could this bag, if present during the flight, have interfered with the proper seat functioning?

Ken

Worryingly the other seat seems to have a bag there as well as does the aircraft behind. Certainly there's a dark shape atop the seat.
I do see a headset beneath the bag though so perhaps this is 'remove before flight' stowage?

I would expect a "remove before flight item" to be red (or other bright) color, but there are more knowledgable folks here to comment on that.

Is this the seat? http://www.ejectionsite.com/ct114seat.htm
Look at the side view, there's an arm with a drogue parachute, which at some point extends right where the bag is. If my life depended on it I would certainly not want an object on top of this design!

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....a05135b3ce.jpg

Yeah, I didn't mean a purpose made cover etc, just an ad hoc item in a handy place whilst they're on the ground.

Seen.

That's an awful lot of 'remove before ...'.

I think they definitely fly with the bags there! Look at this site: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/4...kes?artslide=5

Look at the first picture: bags on the wings.
Second picture, I'm fairly sure it's the same bag on the seat.
That space is empty when they do shows (picture 3)


https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....03be85b801.png
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....e263840beb.png
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....1d41743785.jpg

It sure does look like a duffel bag of some sort rather than a seat cover. I just found a higher resolution version of the original picture and put it into the post above. From some of the file names it looks like this picture may have been taken in July 2019.

A friend who flew with the Blue Angels in the early 1990's said they had a mechanical over the North Pacific and diverted into Cold Bay, Alaska. Many of us have used PACD for an ETOPS alternate on the NOPAC routes. I've never been there myself (except in the simulator).

The hospitality was warm and when the team got things patched up and they were ready to leave the pilots were all given huge frozen fish as a traditional native honor. I guess the C-130 was already in ANC so they put the fish in the cockpit and bent them somewhat to fit into the canopy. My friend did express some concern that an ejection with a fish on top might not go as planned.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....d967723e3.jpeg
A cursory search on Google images would indicate they routinely fly with an overnight bag on top of the seat...🤔