Sea Fury vs. YAK-11

[Jack Cook]

Anyone else remember this besides me

Round 1 to Howard Pardue

Round 2 to Sam

Look'in Good!

[John-Curtiss Paul]

I was watching Howard and Sam out on the course and heard Sam excitedly call a mayday. His plane wasn't trailing any smoke or anything and his landing appeared to be normal.....I did not see the mid-air happen. THEN HE TAXIED BY US WITHOUT HALF HIS RUDDER!!!!!! Howard took it off with his Sea Fury's propeller while on the course qualifying...

That was a very very close one.

[n5151ts]

..yes I was there, on the ramp and saw the whole thing. I was also in howards pit later. He came out of a trailer with a BIG wad of cash in hand and low and behold the yak was fixed.

[mlenoch]

Their pit was next to mine. Reno 1997, I guess.
Sam Richardson took it with very high spirits, since he survived what could have been horribly mortal. To relieve their tension, they had lots of fun with it (note the tail logo 'grafitti') Howard, I remember, was very upset with himself. He was mortified that he almost took out a fellow racer.
We were all very glad everyone walked away.
VL

[MX304]

Their pit was next to mine. Reno 1997, I guess.
Sam Richardson took it with very high spirits, since he survived what could have been horribly mortal. To relieve their tension, they had lots of fun with it (note the tail logo 'grafitti') Howard, I remember, was very upset with himself. He was mortified that he almost took out a fellow racer.
We were all very glad everyone walked away.
VL

That was very close. Howard said he thought the small yak up close was a Sea Fury that was off in the distance, and therefore looked small.

[Jack Cook]

Has I recall this was during qualifications. After this happend the practice of a/c with great differences in speed being on the course at the same time was discontinued.

[MX304]

Has I recall this was during qualifications. After this happend the practice of a/c with great differences in speed being on the course at the same time was discontinued.

Exactly

[drmort]

Ironically, Howard was "run up on" on the runway at Oshkosh with more catastrophic results.

[CAPFlyer]

Yeah, but he was on the receiving end of that one.

[retroaviation]

I was on Howard's crew during that one. Vlado is right about it being in 1997. Anyway, not to say Howard was completely innocent here, but he was on the clock for qualifying and, as mentioned before, "saw and airplane way wide on the course" and thought he was no factor. And yes, inside passes ARE legal at Reno, IF the guy making the pass insures a safe pass. Obviously, the safe pass didn't happen. But back to the story.....Gary Levitz' crew showed us the video from that event and it clearly showed that just as Howard was somewhere around pylon 7 or 8, Sam (being very wide on the course) excecuted a very sharp turn back on the course to keep from going over the Southern deadline. This put him right in Howard's path, and WHAMMO!!!

Certainly a very scary event and both pilots were quite lucky to have survived it. We just unscrewed the four prop blades out of Howard's hub (although only two were slightly damaged from the event) and screwed on a new set obtained from Dennis Sanders. We were running the airplane up that evening, if I remember correctly.

Sam and his crew were very nice about what happened...at first, but as the week went on and the stories got better about the event, they got pretty ugly with us. I tried several times to offer help with changing out the vertical fin and rudder, as David Peeler offered to let them borrow the one off of his brand new Yak 9 that was there, but they wouldn't even speak to me (although Sam was always cordial to me). Oh well, it all worked out.

Sam has, without a doubt, one of the best looking Yak 11's out there. If you ever get a chance to see it in person, I'd recommend it.

Gary

[Lynn Allen]

Isn't that the same Yak on Courtesy's web page for sale??

Lynn

[Jack Cook]

Yup that's it. It's in Germany so maybe it'll come back now?
Very nice a/c!!!

[Jack Cook]

http://warbirdinformationexchange.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9556&highlight=n11mq

[Bill Greenwood]

I hope that the main thought that everyone should focus on in a situation like that, is first how close it was to a tragedy, if it had taken the horizontal tail off. Then, what can be done to avoid it happening in the future? Finding fault has it's place, but most important is to understand how it happened and find the cure. I know Howard is a top pilot, I have flown with him and beside him many times. I assume Sam is also. So how does a mistake happen? Did Sam even know Howard was trying to qualify or where the Fury was behind him on the course? It does seem like a good procedure that a plane qualifying should have the course to himself.

Sometime when we look at an accident, the focus is which pilot made a mistake. Sometimes we may be content once blame it assessed, AND NOT LOOK BEYOND. We really need to assess the whole environment, and find out what situations lead to accidents even with good pilots. In the takeoff accident at Oshkosh, we had a very high levels of pilot skill, and experience. Yet Murphy never sleeps.