What a tragedy. Shows how dangerous these old war planes can be doing airshow routines, something they were never designed for. Can kill even the best of pilots.
Rest in peace Robert Baranackas. Thank you for the wonderful displays.
Bob was practicing over water, which some believe makes it even more dangerous. I was talking with Dudley Henriques about this accident. Dudley piloted his P-51D in air shows for many years. His take, based upon what we know, is that Bob suffered from momentary spatial disorientation, when the ocean and sky are difficult to delineate. Dudley thinks that this delayed Bob's reaction to his predicament, which resulted in his not having enough altitude remaining to recover.
Dudley discussed this in an e-mail as well. He wrote:
"Not being LOA in the P-40, my opinion is somewhat restricted, but if indeed the scenario involved a high speed stall out of a nose high turn, the situation could easily have been exacerbated by the over water issue. An accelerated stall in a nose high turn could easily have introduced a yaw input into the stall break equation. This would indeed, considering that there was at least a high cruise or METO power involved at the break, pull the wing down quickly as Chris has noted.
I wouldn't say flat spin per se from this scenario but rather a quick nose down PSG going into auto-rotation in whatever spin axis was being formed by the cg location at the time of the stall break.
Recovery from such a situation at 2000 feet in any prop fighter would require instant power reduction and instant anti-spin control inputs simultaneously married to a reduction in angle of attack.
My understanding is that Baranaskas held an ACES waiver for loops only and that he was an extremely competent pilot in prop fighters. With this in mind, I would be taking a long serious look into the possibility that the over water flight scenario at the stall break caused enough disorientation through the break that it caused his recovery control input to lag just enough that he ran out of air.
I believe strongly, future NTSB report notwithstanding, that had the stall occurred over land, he might have recovered the airplane in the room provided."
My regards,
Widewing
