hckrnws
Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely
(idahonews.com)
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by ChrisArchitect
by ChrisArchitect
My uninformed guess is that it took both pilots roughly the same amount of time to run through their OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop and conclude their plane was not recoverable and eject.
And for both crew members of the same plane ejecting at the same time, I think the ejection of the second personnel is automated should the first one eject. (Not familiar with the F-18 fighter at all but I know it's like that in other fighters with two crew members).
I am more surprised that they didn't immediately blow up or lose control after colliding. Or even that the crew took that long to eject.
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Every country and culture has its own pros/cons. I always think of the classic examples, Europe lacks a lot of innovation in business and that’s partly attributed to lack of free movement of labor (high layoff cost). Now we could argue to the end of time if that is good or bad and it’s quite too simple minded to point fingers. Every entity has its pro/con.
The US military plans to lose about 25 airframes per year due to various mishaps. They operate well over 10,000 airframes and produce far more new airframes each year than they lose. The optimal loss rate is not zero.
If you wish to avoid it: https://nitter.net/search?f=tweets&q=mountain+home+air
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This specific aircraft is being phased out over the next several years. Assuming these still had some miles left on the airframe, they likely would have been put in cold storage a few years from now.
It seems pretty obvious that ejecting is the right choice either way, but it makes me wonder if there's any alternative in this kind of scenario.
What's shown in the video appears to be some form of slipstreaming by the chase craft that causes them both to lose pitch authority, pulling up into a stall state and then a yaw tailslide.
Their controls would probably feel all mushy and unresponsive at that point.
What is the purpose of the second person in such plane, at the air show?
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Deficit spending leading to an ever rising debt is the source of continued spending. When Debt/GDP grows, we're spending ever more money that we don't have.
Total Debt:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
Total Debt/GDP
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"What is the Boyd Theory? To many it is simply the OODA loop depicting the human behavioral cycle of decision-making. To others it is a description of command and control. To true believers, it is a profound theory of warfare."
-- Some other Military Dude
By the timing seen in the video, the front seater -- the pilot -- ejected in both jets at close to the same time. That automatically ejects the electronics officer first then the pilot momentarily after, as otherwise the front-seat ejection would wash the rear-seater with the launch exhaust from the front seat ejection.
If it looses either the lift or main engine the resulting pitch change would be too rapid for a human to react to so the system triggers ejection.
RIP Bob Calvert.
G for... G for *Germany*, Herr Minister.
Top-performing trig team with tangent flight that (hopefully) never intersects.
:)
Well, except for this time.
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I beleive that raises the question. I don't think it begs the question at all.
The cannon in the nose of a regular Hornet is replaced with computer hardware in the Growler. There are also aerodynamic changes to make it a little more stable so it's a better EW platform. There's probably a million other small differences too, enough that you wouldn't try to convert a -19F Super Hornet into a Growler (although the RAAF did think they'd try at one point).
We do airshows because they are cool. Lots of us love airplanes. Humans do all kinds of activities for entertainment that are not strictly justifiable returns on investment. I hope we never get that boring, though every year we do seem to go that direction.
The net benefit is marketing, and little else. As much as I enjoy watching airshow jet maneuvers, I have to acknowledge that the USSR only sent their Sukhoi pilots on-tour as a publicity stunt to increase their exports. Same goes for the US, France and China.
I remember going to an air show when I was 12 with a good friend. Walking through the C-5 and then seeing a thunderbirds display just captured my friends imagination in a way that’s hard to describe. He ended up becoming a Marine Aviator and basically started planning that path that day.
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For the audience - we love airplanes and love seeing them. I personally prefer the ground portion of air shows, where I can see and sometimes touch the airplanes up close, talk to the pilots and engineers, and generally have a nice day outside :). The aerial component is impressive too, depending on the show. Sometimes it's a bit drawn out.
For the organizers, typically it's a mix of profit and also organizer enthusiasm - a LOT of air show is basically hard-working volunteers.
For the participants, depends - the private entries are there for fun and visibility and showpersonship, cammarederie etc. The armed forces are there to promote and recruit and invoke patriotism and show off and impress.
Ultimately though, if airplanes aren't your kink, you probably won't emotionally / internally understand and that's ok. It's like world rally championship or formula 1 or anything redbull does, a risky entertaining spectacle.
I'm sure there's some bean-counter calculus involving recruitment, PR, demonstration of capabilities, they were going to be doing training flights anyway so why not do a few in public, etc. but they're more rationalisations rather than reasons.
I hope it stays that way too. A world where we take everything away unless it fits into the 5 year ROI spreadsheet sounds dreadful. In any case there'll a long tail of nth-order outcomes that we can't simply reduce down to a risk-reward calculation.
There's probably some deep reason why humans just have a drive to show off their awesome stuff.
Immediately after a show like this, yes, it looks foolish to lose 2 combat planes and almost 4 aircrew for a performative event. Looking at it more generally, it's a tradeoff.
What's the purpose of motor sports? What's the purpose of a firework? What's the purpose of extreme sports exhibitions? mountain climbing expeditions?
Contrary to popular belief, war is mostly about public opinion, not raw strength. Even since (before) roman times, you almost never fight to the last man, you fight until you route the enemy.
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Same reason as for military parades.
Air force, Navy and Marines have many display teams in addition to the two everyone knows. E.g. there's an F-35 display team and an F-22 display team. Usually they fly single though.
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Also “every culture has pros/cons” may be true, but it’s absolutely not true that the ratio of pros/cons is the same for every culture.
As an American, I’m tired of comments like yours. I’m not sure you understand what a cheap shot is. America isn’t on the ground while others are standing over them, kicking them. If anything, America is acting as if its limbs are all completely different organisms. The arm shooting the leg is certainly the leg’s problem, not the arm’s. /s
if you can’t hear anything negative about America without making a fuss, maybe you should listen to the feedback and fix it?
The problem with America's healthcare is not the military, foreign aid or wars. It simply is not.
The problem is the insane amount of waste in the US healthcare system. Y'all already spend much, much more per capita on healthcare than everyone else on earth by a wide margin [1], but get markedly lower returns in life expectancy [2].
Y'all need to cut the waste and middlemen out of your healthcare system, take that money and invest it into prevention (especially: fight against obesity - the US has a serious problem there costing a lot of money and causing a lot of suffering [3]), and you would get far better returns.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States
There are very little profits to these giants if the population was slim and healthy.
Maybe we wouldn’t have had GLP-1 (at all or as quickly) without the huge market that is the USA.
Not saying I fully buy this argument but it is at least plausible defence of libertarianism.
The fact is, every single country on earth figured this out better than US. Which ain't so bad, but the stubbornness to even admit a failure due to some primitive patriotism or whatever and fix it is quite something. Well, you do you.
And that all comes down to the appetite for social spending. It's patriotic to funnel $tn to arms suppliers but only a Commie would want health, dental, mental and social care free for all.
It's not a pseudoargument, it's pointing out the madness in US public spending. This money was available to blow stuff up, kill kids in another country. Why not spending something similar to improve the US domestically.
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Historically there were a few F models pre wired for G systems but the F models in USN inventory don't have this feature and the harnessing work required for the conversation is prohibitive.
Fine, but surely if the achieved loss rate is projected to fall below the optimal one, then the optimal way to compensate is something else than crashing planes at airshows? Like, I don't know, dismantling for spares. Or scrapping. Or even target practice.
Flight hours are one the key differentiating factors in air force quality and a major US advantage is that their pilots have a lot of them.
major?
The maneuvers performed by these types of aircraft at air shows (such as a "rejoin" or close-formation flying) are not circus stunts; they are standard tactical maneuvers that pilots practice daily. More importantly, military pilots are required to fly a certain number of hours each month to maintain their proficiency and flight status. Flying to, from, and during an air show counts toward these mandatory, already-budgeted flight hours.
So aside from the slightly elevated risk to the civilian observers, and the occasional risk due to maneuvers (I think they doing something particularly showy in this case?), the extra cost to the taxpayer do this is ~nil.
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Otherwise there's always a near constant ever present risk of uncontrolled unintended landings with expensive repair and replacement costs.
That has been reported in a number of places and makes a lot of sense. The current order backlog for F-35s runs to almost 2030 despite production capacity upgrades. It is the same reason there are still many normal F-18s flying in the Navy even though the F-35 has existed for years.
The 6th generation platforms appear to be an upgrade super-cycle, replacing all of the remaining 4th generation platforms. The 5th generation platforms were in some respects prototypes of what they really wanted to build. The US Air Force has been making many moves in a similar direction. For example, the procurement numbers for the B-21 (a 6th generation platform) is larger than the number of airframes for any existing bomber and there are serious discussions to scale the production beyond the number of all existing bombers.
There is a lot of signal suggesting that the US military is moving to a pure 6th generation spine for its air capability over the next 5-10 years.
It doesn't look like a fancy manoeuvrer, just slow repositioning and they drifted into each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QlJrUX1Ags is probably a better link to the clip.
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Pilot Flying, Pilot Monitoring (and dealing with radio and coordination).
It's hard to see single-pilot operations outside of General Aviation aka people flying for fun or for dusting crops - and enough incidents happen in GA, especially in cropdusting, that it might make sense to mandate two-pilot operations there, but good luck trying to get that passed, people are already complaining as it is that aviation is too expensive and in fact are moving towards getting commercial aviation to single-pilot operations.
General aviation (GA) is defined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as all civil aviation aircraft operations except for commercial air transport or aerial work, which is defined as specialized aviation services for other purposes
Crop dusting, small frame fire suppression, and small frame geophysical surveying are often single pilot- and geophys surveys can drape entire countries at 80m ground clearance and 200m line spacing (plus transverse lines) so they can really rack up the hours and line kilometres.
And of course, most modern fighter jets are actually single seat. And they operate just fine that way.
if(oh shit) { pull(); }
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“We know you’ve ejected before you land”
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/s
Answer to that is indeed this is tax expenditure.
Although rounding error compared to the war.
It’ll be interesting to see the official findings.
I’ve never trained to eject, but I have trained in situations with parachutes, and the advice is to deploy early. If the thought crosses your mind, the answer is yes.
But yes, pilots still trying to fix stuff when they should have ejected is a common problem.
20 pilot deaths since 1946 (80 years ago), but only 2 pilot deaths since 2000 (25 years ago).
I wouldn't really call that "stomach-churning losses"?
Military propaganda absolutely is about strictly justifiable returns on investments.
>insightful cynicism.
So in response you select the most naive take?
I'm totally in agreement that armed forces are there for reasons you described. But an "air show" is a massive and sometimes separate Venn diagram. There are air shows where main thing is thousands of private airplanes coming from across the country to be together and meet up and have fun.
Put it other way, if armed forces decided it's not worth the recruitment investment and pulled out, air shows would still happen :). For most sizes air shows, the biplane aerobatic stunt done by a crazy local 50 year old real estate agent, is way more fun than the c5 galaxy transporter showing "short takeoff" :-)
Why do people go see rocket launches?
It's a superset of the reasons you poorly articulated, and those reasons would include the fact it's cool. Cool things can help both recruitment and morale, and the US military seems to recognize that: https://armedforcessports.defense.gov/Sports/Esports/
If this is just meant to be another comment on the situation which comes with an implicit grain of salt, then the browbeating doesn't make sense.
> No. They are for recruitment and showing other nations what is on hand in case they want to mess with them.
That's what he said.
They do it because it’s awesome and it is one of the few opportunities they get to show off their gear to the public!
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But some people really like circuses.
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There are the patrouille Suisse, patrouille de France, Frecce Tricolori...
After the Ramstein Air Base disaster security was tightened a lot though.
As well as private aviation has a different standing in the US in my experience.
Saying "not a thing" might have been to absolute, but my impression is that flight shows are much more known and I would assume more common in the US.
It is worth mentuoning though they do all that in trainer jets, not actual fighter jets. Which is not that cool. I would loved it more of they would fly actual fighters.
UK list, for example: https://www.air-shows.org.uk/2025/04/uk-airshow-calendar-202...
Rest of Europe: https://www.air-shows.org.uk/2025/04/european-airshow-calend...
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Even more people died at the Hillsborough disaster than died at the Ramstein air show, so I guess we should never have sports events at stadiums anymore.
More people died at the Station Nightclub fire, so I guess we can never have nightclubs anymore.
I could go on and on. Yes, we should take all precautions and be safe as possible for events, but everything has some risk.
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Did some cursory searches/math and it looks like about 1-2% of aerial shows in the US have a fatality (1-2 deaths annually with about 2000 shows on average over the last 20 years). If those numbers are correct (and they may very well not be as it’s a mix of LLM and Google quick searches) 1-2% doesn’t seem worth it.
Edit: I’m an idiot. .05-.1%. Seems a bit silly still but not as bad as I thought.
That is likely true. However, it is a heck of a demonstration of pilot skill. The Blue Angels somewhat regularly post in-cockpit views of their airshow practice and it is wild how tight a formation they fly; I really recommend seeking out some of those videos, it is totally worth it. Well, for me at least :). It is not unheard of (but not common) for them to inadvertently make contact, since they fly like 18 inches apart, but given they have nearly identical vectors it does not often result in a crash.
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Don't trust LLMs. They are bullshit machines.
Awe inspiring and absolutely terrifying
...and unfortunately sometimes also military mistakes, but fortunately this doesn't happen often.
This is a bad faith rebuttal that intentionally tries to distort the comparison.
Here's the salient point you're trying to ignore: many other countries have lower healthcare costs and better health outcomes because they've prioritized investing in healthcare systems that work better for their citizens.
Government budgets are not unlimited and when your country spends nearly $1 trillion/year on the military (more than double the second-biggest spender) on top of a debt pile rapidly approaching $40 trillion, it's reasonable to question whether the people running the show have their priorities straight.
As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized a long time ago, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
To which I'd add a point about socioeconomic death. Of course, that doesn't resonate with people who measure the country's economic situation by stock prices.
> It seems at least as likely to do with the incredibly high salaries we pay doctors.
Doctor wages account for about 8% of healthcare spend in the US, so even if doctors worked for free, you wouldn't even come close to parity with other countries in terms of healthcare costs.
Don't you think something is wrong when the cost of an emergency room visit in much of the country exceeds individuals' median liquid savings?
> And the fact that we use like 50% more healthcare services than a typical single-payer society.
This simply isn't true. Per Kaiser Family Foundation: "The U.S.’s higher spending on providers is driven more by higher prices than higher utilization of care. Patients in the U.S. have shorter average hospital stays and fewer physician visits per capita, while many hospital procedures have been shown to have higher prices in the U.S. "
I think it beyond anything that could be construed as honesty to call such advocacy "good faith".
Let the people have their stupid circuses. The actual cost of airshows is fairly low on an annual basis. The DOD is gonna make a bunch of C5s pack random crap around, make a bunch of pilots do training hours, make a bunch of NG units practice crowd control, might as well use all that expense to put on a show. Better for PR and for morale and for training that way (turns out everyone gives more of a crap about doing a good job when the public is there).
It's not just about the numbers themselves, it's about what they signal in terms of priorities.
Is it really so strange to question whether a country with $40 trillion in debt that spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its war machine - more than 2x the amount spent by the second-largest military spender in the world - has its priorities straight?
The saddest thing about healthcare in America is that it's working exactly as designed. The high costs are a feature, not a bug. And large numbers of the people who are an emergency room visit away from a financial crisis cheer the products of a military-industrial complex that has produced enough firepower to destroy the planet thousands of times over.
Personal take-home pay for physicians is 8-10% of total US healthcare spending ($5tr). (or 20%/$1.11t for "physician and clinical services" overall which includes doctors, clinical staff, admin, and overhead costs.)
US total spending on pharmaceuticals is $1 tr; net spending on outpatient prescription drugs is $600b.
The DoD's total spending is $961.6b for FY 2026.
There's little argument against reforming both military spending and healthcare spending in the US, but (as Scott Galloway says) it's awfully hard to find a prominent politician who vocally supports reforming both these (not one at the expense of the other). So, the out-of-control spending/borrowing will continue.
Anyway, as to this crash, all other considerations apart, E/A-18Gs (electronic warfare planes) cost 60% more than F-18s. Who authorized flying them in an airshow?
One can acknowledge the necessity of having a military while at the same time questioning the magnitude of defense spending.
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It's simply the outcome of a system that puts private profits before public good (in this case health, but you can see the same thing play out in other sectors too such as education).
Everything is working as designed.
Because there is already more than enough money in the US healthcare system. Just shoving in more money will not help anybody at all.
Getting there is the hurdle. Forcibly nationalise insurers and their hospital networks? Price capping all the things? Doesn't sound very American.
That leaves competition. To fund that, you need tax revenue. Eventually people will pay that tax instead of insurance but it's infrastructure, so it's front-loaded.
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Airplanes normally don’t fly so close.
Only half kidding. They fly with a pilot and an EWO, that's procedure. Not much more to it.
The other factor is showing how good you are: sure, you can do formation flying in an Extra 300 or a C150, but doing it in a fighter jet show precission and skill, because it will not forgive you as easy as a slower moving plane.
I've been to a few air shows and even f22 with its vector thrusting, is not (to me) as impressive as the little prop aerobatics doing things that make me (even with a bit of flight training) wonder how is that even possible :). They are typically closer & slower (so you can appreciate the action better), and just pack so much more stuff and maneuvers right there where you can see them - the density / bang for the buck is far greater. By necessity, military jets are fly bys - they zoom in, pull up and wheee go up fast, then they go away. Then 2 minutes later they zoom in, cross each other impressively closely, then they fly away for a bit. It's exciting and fun don't get me wrong, but when I plan my air show day, I plan it around cool little aerobatic planes, not the military jets.
YMMV :). But my point in this thread is:
1. Yes, absolutely, military is there for recruitment
2. Military recruitment flying is empathically not all there is to an air show to all the people, and there exist air shows with minimal to no armed force presence.
I have seen so many military display teams. Yes, I like the roar. But they blur together.
> sure, you can do formation flying in an Extra 300 or a C150,
But that's not what we watch Extra 330s do. We watch them do other things that are nuts that are also not so easily forgiven. I have fond memories of seeing Patty Wagstaff, Sean Tucker, and Rob Holland (rip). (And before that, Amelia Reid in her 150...)
I saw a RedBull race and was impressed about the agility of the pilots.
But I like jets more because they go faster. And they have afterburners. And they go vertical faster than any propeller plane will ever be able to. And the margin of error is smaller. Espcially closer to the ground.
People fly air shows with crop dusters.
> So in response you select the most naive take?
As well as your reply to me now, as having an unduly negative tone... at least, given the lack of substance or importance.
(Ironically, I have less of hang up on meaningful arguments delivered with edge than most people.)
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Both are unprofessional comments, but only the original was dishonest. The "too many comments" shtick is a thought terminating cliche that shouldn't be encouraged on HN.
The military participates in airshows because it's good for morale, because it helps showcase capabilities, because it's good PR for military expenditures, and because it's good for recruitment. All of these effects are mostly because it's cool.
The other people flying in airshows are flying there because they love aviation and because it's cool (not so much the money :)
For that I'd say it's that France is saving its actual fighters for combat units because it doesn't has enough jets, unlike the US
The margins, that completely depends on the pilot and act design. You can make margins arbitrarily small at any speed :).
(As an imperfect example - a world rally car going through a 80kph blind corner over a crest on snow between the trees is not necessarily more of a margin / less of skill or spectacle than F1 taking a tarmac open corner at 200kph:)
I think it's interesting how as humans we tend to sort into valuing one of these much more than the other, though.
I like the rally car and the aerobatic piston plane a lot.
I want to like F1 and the fast jets more... but after being initially blown away I get bored pretty quick. I think what they're doing is incredibly cool and I can appreciate it but...
But the dude upthread is the exact opposite.
[I do think you need to be more of a "car guy" to like rally and more of a "plane guy" to like what the little planes do. The stuff that is big and loud and fast is easier to appreciate. But I know plenty of people who really know their stuff that still prefer the big and loud and fast].
Maximally correct answer is "there are many reasons with complex interplay", and those reasons do include the fact it's cool! Being cool has interplay with morale, recruitment, and even their ham-fisted attempt at referencing geopolitics.
They'd be "more right" if they said in addition, but they just straight up said "No."
(Also where did you read a too many comments shtick?)