At least in regard to FAST/FFI standards, the pop-up break is a non-standard break, and for a reason - it creates a lot of complexity for the flight.
It needs to be carefully briefed and practiced, to include climb and G profiles, and flight characteristics of dissimilar aircraft. The first rule of any break is to acquire the preceding aircraft as soon as possible. Several folks have stated that the AD pilot should not have lost sight of the Mustang - that's utter silliness, the AD's pilot head immediately went forward as he is the temporary flight lead and responsible for clearing the flight path as soon as the Mustang pulled. If you can't find the preceding aircraft, knock it off.
Two observations:
1. Look at the difference between the Mustang and the AD's pull. The Mustang pulls up, then rolls, then very gentle pull for flight separation. The AD pilot almost immediately rolled wings up. Very little UP and a lot of OUT.
2. The AD appears to pull a LOT of G throughout the maneuver. That would quickly put BBD under the cowl or wing. The AD may have picked up the trailing aircraft on downwind from the previous flight. Spacing would have appeared excessive, which would have encouraged the AD pilot to keep power on and tighten his turn.
I don't typically fly up-and-out breaks to downwind, but have done them out of close trail. We always brief UP, acquire, roll, pull (OUT) for separation, then match altitude and heading.
It sure would have been interesting to listen in on that debrief.
Randy Haskin wrote:
All of those are factors that should have been completely considered and discussed in the preflight briefing.
Outside of a specifically-briefed scenario where the roles are reversed, it is ALWAYS the responsibility of the wingmen to keep their lead IN SIGHT and AVOID HITTING their lead. That includes taking into consideration all of the potential performance differences between aircraft and compensating for them with that maneuvering. That also includes maneuvering up to and including over-Ging your own aircraft to avoid a collision.
There's a second part of the contract, though, that experienced flight leads know -- that is, always maneuver predictably so as to not surprise your wingmen. An erratically-flying lead gives his wingmen 3D problems to solve that are much more difficult (think of how a dogfight works -- it's basically formation flying with non-cooperative leads and wingmen) and may not allow wingmen the time to maneuver to their "out" should a conflict pop up.
With respect to this particular incident, it is tough for me to pin blame on either the Mustang lead or the Skyraider wingman, as we don't know if there were any mechanical issues that caused either the Mustang to fly in a non-predictable way that the Skyraider pilot did not expect, or mechanical issues that caused the Skyraider to be unable to maneuver his aircraft away from his lead.
Either way, formation pilots all need to take this opportunity to remember that these contracts are "written in blood", and that violation of these contracts can have disastrous consequences as shown in this incident.
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