Shockwave Jet Truck Explosion At Airshow - 2 July 2022
 

Shockwave Jet Truck - powered by a 3 x J34-48 jet engines each 4,900 lbf with afterburner - a regular "padding out the program" civilian addition at military air shows over here in the USA - has exploded during the Michigan Air Show killing the driver.

The J34 was obsolescent almost as soon as it appeared in 1947 and was latterly used to augment power on the P-2 Neptune.

Shockwave was capable of 376 mph consuming fuel at over 400 US gallons per mile.

Shockwave at MCAS Yuma in 2017

May he Rest in Peace

In the late 1990's I was amazed when I saw the Shockwave at U S Airshows, mind blowing. Rest In Peace.

What happened? Can't really make sense of the video 🤔

apparently mechanical failure led to the truck rolling.

From what I saw on another video, it looked like an uncontained engine failure leading to a tyre failure, high speed spin and roll....

Having seen the brutal way these guys mistreat their ancient 1940's technology engines just for effect (repeated on-off afterburner etc) its hardy a surprise when one finally lets go, is it?

Yea, it's hard to tell what the initiating event was (although an uncontained engine failure seems likely). But what made it fatal was the sudden turn then roll at high speed.

Dreadful accident - RIP

Sad accident - and respect to the commentator for keeping his cool.

Looks like he could have possibly been ware of some thing awry, drag chute deploys at the :53 mark before things go up in flames and sideways.

[QUOTE=megan;11256382]Looks like he could have possibly been ware of some thing awry, drag chute deploys at the :53 mark before things go up in flames and sideways.

Blancolirio has posted a interesting video on his YouTube channel about how the controls work in the truck can't post URLs

Looks possibly like the tyre exploded first. Something is flying away significantly before the flames are visible. After that it looks as if the rim of the last left tyre is close to the asphalt and debris is thrown up. After that flame appear and at the same moment the trucks starts yawing to the right. Drag chute deployment may possibly have resulted from vibration from a tyre coming apart.

The repeated booms of the afterburners engagement on-off sure gets ones attention. I have seen (and heard and felt) them over the decades- and it seems the burner cans were homebuilt- as the original engines fitted to aircraft did not have afterburners. Looking like tire(s) failures somewhere in the sequence and it seems they used regular truck tires!!

Shaved truck tyres I saw somewhere. That is with most of the tread removed before use.

Will reduce heat build up due to tyre flex and I guess allow them to hold together better at higher speed due to the reduced rotating mass. On the face of it seems pretty dodgy but it probably couldn't have lasted for so long unless they had done some homework.

It's the way she exploded before yawing that doesn't seem right to me and before someone points out it's a jet truck I am well aware of that but surely there's instantly a massive amount of fuel feeding that fire? Air France Flight 4590 comes to mind or uncontained engine failure.

Don't know how i know this but i do, probably from talking to REME too much. Truck tyres are really not safe at high speed, in fact when truck racing first started in the 80s, the only truck tyres guaranteed for racing were Bandag Remoulds.....

Father of the driver is reporting that the initiating event was a blown tire that ruptured a fuel tank.
I don't know if he has access to actual data, or is just speculating like the rest of us.

I think you'll find there were a number of J34 variants with afterburners though nothing says they didn't make their own.

Meleagertoo, I was basing my comments on the video that was posted as #14 in this thread where the commentator says@ minute 1:40 that the truck was equipped with three J34-48 (non-afterburning version) engines common to the T-2A Buckeye but had custom, or "homebuilt" afterburners fitted.

Blown tyre... Punctured tank... Reminds me something. Will there be a NTSB investigation?

A roll your own afterburner, even one limited to ground level use would be quite an achievement.
There were huge difficulties to get working burners in the early days. Putting the heaters in has a signiicant effect all he way forward through the engine. Not to say that you can't home build a copy of a later version's burners, but you will need the modified fuel control unit, as well as the nozzles, flame stabilising gutters etc. Etc.

N

Bengo, it's not like they are creating something that doesn't exist. All of the major technical engineering work has been done it now a modification of a burner to work on the current engines

There are seven versions of the J34 that have after burners, I'm sure adaption of one to the version he used wouldn't have been an overly complicated task.

Bengo

Whilst I agree that a homemade afterburner would be sporting achievement, remember that a key feature of afterburner is that it "should" have minimal effect on the core engine.