Surprising Cause of Oshkosh F-16 Runway Overrun

Seems to me he might have had a couple of more options. 1) Go around and hold untill he could wipe it off. 2) Pop the canopy. A lot less expensive than the damage observed.

Under the circumstances it was a great landing, the pilot walked away and no additional people were hurt. He made a decision and all that was done was some damage to a piece of equipment. It looks as though it was done right, good job.

He should have rolled the window down a bit.

Fogged-over canopy? ...really? What an odd excuse for an overrun. Does the Air Force not understand that there were a couple thousand eyewitnesses there watching this go down? There's been a lot of chatter over on the EAA boards and while there are some conflicting stories about what people think they saw, there isn't a single person who noticed fog on the canopy of this F-16. In fact, several people claim that the pilot was actually waving to the crowd as he sped past ( though I did not see that personally.) Sure is hard to see the pilot if he was fogged in... and yet everyone could see him just fine.

The aircraft did touch down a little late, but then it just sailed down the runway as if there were no brakes - he didn't even deploy the speed brake. Call me crazy, but if I am not mistaken, a fogged canopy would not prevent a pilot from applying brakes. Nor would it prevent him from seeing his HUD, which would allow him many options, including a go-around. Between a functioning HUD and a top-notch flight control tower there at the field a truly fogged canopy would likely have been treated as being similar to entering IMC. Does a highly experienced fighter pilot with a perfectly functioning aircraft think about ejecting just because he enters IMC? I think not.

Sorry... but I simply don't understand why the AF is trying to sell this story at all. Why is the truth such a bad option?

Here is my take on this accident, and I am speaking from experience, but not in an F-16! A few years ago, I had an "extreme fogging" experience except that it was oil on the outside of the bubble canopy. I flew by instruments to the nearest airport. When lining up for landing, I could see nothing! I would not have been on the runway except for the guidance of a Certificated Flight Instructor who was, luckily for me, on the ground in an airplane and able to provide me with guidance on the CTAF frequency. Once on the ground, I used MAXIMUM braking to minimize the chances of an overrun! Until I was stopped and opened the canopy, I was not even sure I was on the runway! A few months later, when the FAA gave the Flight Instructor an award for his assistance in this incident, he asked me if I knew I landed diagonally on the runway?

Here is where I think the F-16 report is hard to understand. The report states that, "if not for the lack of outside visual references, the pilot could have come to a stop on the runway with about 1,000 feet to spare." If the F-16 pilot did not have adequate "outside visual references" maybe he should have used MAXIMUM braking to try to bring the F-16 to a stop in the shortest possible distance (even if that meant burning up some brakes and tires)? According to the report, that would have been about 1,000 feet from the end of an 8,000 foot runway. I am not taking anything away from the skills of a highly trained military pilot and I was not with him in the cockpit but why not use maximum braking if you cannot see outside?

With no visual reference, he landed and rolled down the runway quite accurately in the video, but couldn't apply any brakes. Stephen Pope, help us understand why the brakes couldn't be applied. Thank you.

The "fogging" they're likely referring to isn't the 'window fogging' most may be familiar with; the F-16 ECS is capable of producing actual FOG inside the cockpit, rather than mere fogging on the canopy that can be wiped off. (To that effect - when strapped in, it is impossible to reach forward of the HUD and wipe the canopy to begin with. The average person, or myself at 6', can't reach more than a couple of inches past the HUD with the lap belt on. The best he could have hoped for was to wipe an area above and to the sides of the HUD, which at the landing AOA of 13 degrees doesn't do squat for forward visibility. Loosening the lap belt to wipe it is NOT an option, as a subsequent ejection, either intentional or accidental, would likely be fatal.)

On an A/C model you get ECS air at two locations: Behind the seat/aft of the consoles, and through "canopy defogging" louvered openings forward of the HUD. Even on the ground, we regularly observed fog blowing from the ECS ducts and dissipating within a couple inches of the duct once the cold air mixed sufficiently with ambient cockpit air. If the ECS system was blowing actual fog, the openings forward of the HUD would put all the fog directly in the pilots field of view, but it would most likely dissipate without filling the whole cockpit for the reasons mentioned above. This exact scenario can render forward visibility to near zero, but leave up/side visibility unimpeded.

So what's the fix, assuming a normally functioning ECS? Turn the heat up. It's the cold air on a hot/humid day that creates the blowing fog. This isn't something that a smart pilot would do on landing roll, and it takes several moments for the temperature to change anyhow. For a malfunctioning ECS, he might not have had that option. Perhaps he was a few knots fast and subsequently landed long because he WAS trying to turn the heat up - an F-16 will float considerably if your approach speed isn't correct. Maybe that's why he didn't extend the speedbrakes, too. As for braking - max anti-skid braking, with aft stick, will keep the nose up until you've slowed down quite a bit. That's the normal short-field landing procedure, by the way.

As for the O-1/CYA perception, anyone in the Air Force will tell you that AF management won't hesitate to hang someone out to dry if they screwed up. Have any of you read the accident report from the Alaska F-22 crash, where they blamed the pilot of being "too distracted due to his inability to breath" as the cause of his fatal accident?

Unless someone can come on here and refute my six years of F-16 maintenance experience and subsequent 6 years as an aircrew member, or Geff MCarthy's six years as a flight doc at an F-16 base, and provide a more experience-based explanation: Perhaps the armchair Cessna F-172 and Piper FA-28 crowd ought to quit throwing darts at a pilot who, given the circumstances, did a pretty decent job.

@rok_hunter - Thank you for the excellent explanation of the F-16 ECS and your take on what might have been happening inside that cockpit. I was very skeptical of the AF answer... it just didn't jive with what I thought I saw. But thanks to your write-up it all makes MUCH more sense now.

I read that he didn't use the speed brakes as he was concerned that his nose high attitude would cause contact with the runway. Having flown the F-16, you can grind the lower speed brakes with too high angle on rollout, but that would seem preferable to rolling off the pavement. The F-16 is notoriously bad off the pavement. Almost every accident in the grass results in a sheared nose wheel and sometimes a rollover (one I am very familiar with as a pilot in my unit tried that and the crash team had to use an abrasive saw to get him out of the cockpit.). I noted in the video that he was able to keep the aircraft on the runway until the end and I didn't see tire smoke from max braking...

Must remember that one -- almost as good as "swerved to miss the elk."