Double Tragedy
By Mitch Berg
I’m passingly familiar with Gerald Beck of Wahpeton, ND; plane geek that I am, I knew that he restored old warplanes.
So his death at the Oshkosh Air Show on Friday was a dual tragedy;
Gerald S. Beck was killed in the crash of two P-51 Mustangs, single-seat fighters used in World War II, said Dick Knapinski, a spokesman for the Experimental Aircraft Association, which puts on the weeklong air show called AirVenture.
The other pilot involved in the crash, Casey Odegaard, 24, Kindred, N.D., suffered minor injuries…Witnesses said one plane was behind the other, and when its propeller hit the tail of the other plane, it flipped up and over the other aircraft, landing upside down in a fireball.
Ugh.
My condolences to the Becks.
July 30th, 2007 at 11:17 am
In Dayton, OH at the Vectren air show, Jim LeRoy died when his Pitts Bulldog spun into the ground on Saturday afternoon. A friend of mine was a friend of his (when my buddy soloed for the first time, Jim called to congratulate him), and was pretty torn up by it. He received an email from the head engineer of the company that built LeRoy’s plane, who was also the only other person in the world who had ever flow it. He hand-built parts of the plane. This guy was able to analyze some video of the crash and saw that one of the wings failed. He had personally tested that plane to 10G wing loading without failure, so he estimated that LeRoy somehow managed to pull maneuvers exceeding 12G. At that rate, it was very possible LeRoy wasn’t even conscious when he hit the runway.
Between the Beck, LeRoy and the 4 men killed in the chopper crash, this has really been a lousy weekend for general aviation.