A bad day
It was an especially tough day to survive in the military yesterday. According to CNN, an Air Force Thunderbirds pilot safely ejected from his F-16 jet over Colorado, while a Navy Blue Angels F-18 pilot wasn’t so lucky over Tennessee.
The pilot of a Blue Angels jet was killed Thursday during practice for a weekend air show, hours after a Thunderbirds F-16 crashed following a flyover at the U.S. Air Force Academy commencement ceremony attended by the President, officials said.
The Navy said the Blue Angels pilot died from injuries suffered in the crash in Tennessee.
The Thunderbirds pilot safely ejected before the plane went down in Colorado, officials said.
Meanwhile at Fort Hood, Texas, flash flooding took the lives of at least five soldiers according to the Killeen Daily Herald;
Five Fort Hood soldiers were killed and four others were missing Thursday after the armored vehicle they were in overturned at a low-water crossing during a training mission.
[…]
Three soldiers were in stable condition Thursday evening at Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center on post. They were rescued from the water near the vehicle and immediately transported to the Coryell Memorial Healthcare System in Gatesville before their transfer to Darnall.
Flash flooding was one of many reasons I hated Fort Hood.
A reminder that training for war can be as deadly as the war itself.
May the Angels of His Mercy bring solace to all their family and friends
Amen.
Amen
Condolences to family and friends…may they rest in peace.
Flash flooding was one of many reasons I hated Fort Hood.
Whenever there’s many reasons to hate a place natural disaster frequency does little to add to the appeal.
Rest in peace, gentlemen. May God grant comfort to your families.
FWIW, knowing how to avoid a flash flood is a survival skill. My father grew up in west Texas, and when they arrived in France in WWII he knew better than to pitch his tent in a gully. His was one of the few not washed away in a flash flood. The ignorance delayed them getting into position while their gear was replace. Hard to fight when your rifle is downstream in a mud bank.
While stationed at Hood Back in 69-70 a 5 ton got washed away where Cowhouse Creek crossed East Range Road. Like a lot of people, I never realized the force behind the water at low water crossings and the incident made a believer out of me.
A lot of people don’t realize that water is nearly incompressible and consequently fail to understand the energy in even a low and slow moving body of water.
Because of the relative incompressibility the energy in moving water can only be diverted and not really stopped by objects weighing less than the force of water that are not anchored to allow energy to divert or to be stored. Lots of things get swept away in slow moving flood waters. Anyone living near a river has probably seen structures that seem impossible to move being lifted off of a foundation or simply crushed under the inexorable force of water pressure against the structure.
Glad you learned the lesson early, it’s an important one. My uncle was an avid boater and I learned that lesson from him as a child and it was reinforced many, many times over my lifetime.
Bingo.
Water weighs 62.4 pounds per
squarecubic foot. If it’s moving, multiply that weight by around 1.5 times the speed in MPH of the current. An appreciable fraction of that product will be the force exerted on each square foot of whatever obstructs that flow (it’s not 100% unless the obstruction is complete because, while water is incompressible, its a fluid vice a solid and can deform – leaving some energy behind – when it hits solid resistance).The side of even a small car has an area measured in tens of square feet. Yeah, even a relatively modest flow of water can move – and tumble – a car. Easily.
The force of the water is compounded by the buoyancy of the vehicle as the water flowing beneath it begins to lift the tires from the road surface. Once that ground contact is lost, even the most minimal force on the upstream side will move the vehicle downstream. When the lifting force becomes great enough to float a vehicle over any guard rails is when the situation becomes deadly.
I worked with Jeff last year when the Blues came to Willow Run Airport for our Yankee Air Museum airshow. He was the #7, the narrator, which includes being the advance man for the team and the team’s point of contact for anything the team needed. I was his point of contact with the show.
He was terrific to work with. He wasn’t a “we need this, and we need it NOW” type of guy. It was always “hey, can we get this?” or “Is there any way you can..?” The last time I heard from him, we were joking about our hockey teams (he was an Avalanche fan, I’m a Red Wings fan). He had flown a Red Wing on one of the media/celebrity rides that they give and he and I had traded comments about our respective teams. He said that YIP was one of their top spots to go to, and he looked forward to seeing us next year.
He was no prima-donna; he was a solid, down-to-earth, regular kind of guy who did extraordinary things during his career. I won’t forget him.
May his wife and two children somehow find comfort and solace.
Semper Fi, Jeff.
Where I live, flash floods are unusual, but they do happen. People will drive into what looks like standing water and get trapped by it.
May they all find peace.
Having lived in Texas for most of my life, I am well aware of the dangers of flash flooding and driving into water. But even I almost got caught yesterday, driving over what I thought was just some dirt that had previously washed over the roadway, but it was actually moving water. Thankfully it wasn’t very deep or wide, but it was enough to cause me to swerve and give me a good scare. Moving water that is 6″ deep is enough to wash a car away.
Condolences to the families of the soldiers of the 3/16 FA 2nd ABCT(Black Jack). Luckily my son’s unit was not training yesterday.
if you haven’t seen the T-Bird crash scene, it’s rather incredible. Gear was down. Something happened. Pilot ejected. A/C landed itself, upright. Aside from apparent nose damage, you would think it nothing but a rough landing.
Believe it or not, it’s not the first time something like that has happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
Unfortunately, it’s happened more than once – and not all occurrences have had good endings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgian_MiG-23_crash
“One of the other pilots on the mission was reported to have radioed Faust during his descent by parachute that “you’d better get back in it!”.[3] Faust watched incredulously as the now-pilotless aircraft descended and skidded to a halt in a farmer’s field near Big Sandy, Montana.[5] Faust drifted into the nearby mountains. He was later rescued by local residents using snowmobiles.”
Unbelievable. If you made this shit up, no one would believe it.
I learned about NOT being in a low point during the monsoon season while stationed at Ft Huachuca (3x). And everyone there, in the entire state, gets hammered with the same lesson, year after year. Yet every year, there are those idjits who persist in attempting to beat the odds and try to cross the (not so) dry stream beds, and get washed away. This happens especially in Tucson (and Phoenix?).
Concur. Mother Nature can be a vicious bitch in the desert, and she’ll kill you if you let her have the chance.
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2015/12/09/body-identified-as-cochise-county-flash-flood-victim/
Damn near got washed away in NM once, watched the van ahead of us cross maybe 18″ deep flash flooding across the road, when we attempted to follow a surge maybe 8″ tall rolled down and damn near pushed us over the downstream side of the road. All 4 wheels on the ground and we still got pushed by less than a foot tall wave.
Oh, and Hondo – think you mean a cubic foot of water, not a square foot.
Yep, it takes less than 6″ of moving water to wash a car away. “Turn around, don’t drown!”
Correct, and thanks for catching the error – it should indeed have been 62.4lb/ft^3. Now corrected above.
“‘Tis a dangerous business we proffer my friends”…
Godspeed to all of them and prayers for the surviving families…
Does it seem improbable that we lost two demonstration group aircraft within an hour of each other?
My condolences to the families. I’ve seen Ft. Hood flooding first hand (2nd AD ’83-88), with the same results.