Metro Jacksonville

The YAK 52 is the most popular and perhaps famous trainer aircraft from the former Soviet Union.

QuotePALM COAST, Fla.â€"A single-engine Yak 52 plane, part of a four-plane aerobatic team that had taken off a few minutes earlier, crashed at 4:27 p.m. today in the woodline just beyond the runways of the Flagler County Airport as the late-afternoon crowd watched, agape. One pilot is dead.

The Pilot, Bill Walker, known as “Wild Bill” in flying circles, was from Cookville, Tenn. “Air shows are all about smoke and noise,” he’d once said. He was part of the Red Thunder Air Show team, which was on its way to Lakeland’s fly-in after the Flagler show. The Red Thunder team is made up of six members from South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Louisiana. “We all meet in a little place down here in northern Alabama called Courtland,” Walker told an interviewer 18 months ago, “and we have a box there that we practice in, and we fly air shows mostly in the eastern half of the United States.”

Moments earlier, the plane had been performing a maneuver with another, “doing a heart,” as one teen-age witness described it, the second or third that the quartet of planes had performed after taking off only a few minutes earlier.

“The one plane was doing a loop and the other one was going straight down. He just feel out of the sky, straight down.” Matt Barron, who’d been watching the maneuvers, said.

“The two planes were doing the same thing, they were doing a maneuver,” said Jay Gardner, the Flagler County property appraiser, who was relaxing at the show and saw the crash. “They were trying to pull up, he flew straight into the ground.”

An hour later, firefighters were at the scene containing a brush fire that had erupted as a consequences of the crash.

Wings Over Flagler Organizer Bill Mills Talks About the Crash

“Obviously a tragedy on an absolutely fabulous day here,” Bill Mills, the organizer of the second annual Wings Over Flagler fly-in, said a little after 5:30, moments before he was to speak for the first time since the crash to a gathering of the show’s pilots in a VIP tent. “One of the premier events for Flagler has unfortunately been tainted by a tragedy, and we’re all extremely sad for our pilot friend, and may God rest his soul.”

Mills himself had been up performing in his plane earlier in the day. He was aware of what was going through pilots’ minds at that moment.

“We just lost one of our own,” Mills said. We know the risks of what we do. We weigh those risks, and for the love of flying, we accept those risks. Unfortunately, sometimes this happens.” Mills added: “We love what we do, and we will do it again, and my guess is these pilots are going to celebrate his life and make this show go on, unless somebody tells us otherwise. As far as I’m concerned, the show is on.”

The show was halted soon after 4:30 p.m. Saturday. It was scheduled to run until 5 p.m. Deputy County Administrator Sally Sherman said the show will go on, as scheduled, on Sunday, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., but without aerobatics.

Mills said the Red Thunder team has been performing at air shows for years without problems.

Jack Howell, a pilot and the president of Teens-In-Flight, which trains young pilots out of the Flagler County Airport, was at the show all day. “My big concern now is the pundits,” Howell said. “There’s always critics out there hooting and hollering about air shows.” But, he added, “this is what we do. This is our passion, this is our life. We know what we’re doing. And sometimes bad things happen.”

About an hour after the crash, smoke from the crash site had been reduced to wisps, though firefighters were still at the scene of the crash in force. The medical examiner arrived after 6 p.m. The county’s top administrative staff, which had not been there at the time of the crash, had arrived and tried its best to look useful. Emergency crews, including the Flagler County Fire Department, were in control of the situation.

SOURCE: http://flaglerlive.com/19772/wings-over-flagler-plane-crash

QuoteBUNNELL -- A pilot was killed instantly after a Russian-made stunt plane crashed this afternoon minutes after take-off at the Wings Over Flagler air show at the Flagler County Airport.

The pilot -- whose identity was not immediately available -- was flying a Yak-52 as part of a four-plane Red Thunder Air Show Team when the plane crashed at 4:29 p.m., about a half-hour before the show's conclusion.

Witnesses said the team had been performing for a few minutes, completing a series of aerial loops before the accident.

"They were doing loops and he was going down and he just never came back up," said spectator Ed Palmer of Palm Coast.

SOURCE:
www.news-journalonline.com/.../plane-crashes-at-wings-over-flagler-show.html

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