Polish F-16 pilot dies during air show practice run

He went vertical, the wrong way. RIP

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaa but you can tell by the engine noise that he had a solid second of shitting his pants before it happened.

Dang, that looks an awful lot like an inexperienced pilot or one on a suicide mission

Must’ve been an older model without Auto GCAS.

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Must’ve been an older model without Auto GCAS.

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Pleading ignorance on exactly how it works, but I wonder if even that would have saved him. It looked like he was full aft-stick right to the end.

That El Toro pilot also went below the hard deck (cue the Top Gun jokes) and got in a ton of trouble. It was during the practice days and not the actual show.

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Must’ve been an older model without Auto GCAS.

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Not sure if this is a joke

Both maneuvers turn a plane 180 degrees while changing altitude.
Split S puts the plane to a lower position by rolling to inverted and pulling up on the stick which initially pulls the plane down until it comes back to upright flight.
An Immelman puts it higher by climbing to inverted and rolling to upright position.

All my time is in the F-14 but I watched the exact same thing happen to an F16 at a NAS Kingsville, Texas airshow back in 2000. Unlike the tomcat, the F16 has a “limiter” that limits Gs and angle of attack so that the plane can’t be over stressed or stalled. During the pilot’s pure vertical Split S maneuver, he either started too low and/or didn’t pull enough angle of attack at the beginning, causing him to be too low in the middle, and because he was performing a “Pure Vertical” split S, he had zero options other than hitting the terrain. Pure Vertical Split S’s were outlawed at US air shows when I was still in the Navy, not sure now tho.