Aftermath: The Reno Air Race Crash

Peter Garrison

Friday, December 30, 2011 at 08:14 PM ET

Verified

** The P-51 known as The Galloping Ghost
that crashed at the Reno Air Races, killing
11 and injuring more than 70.**

Key Takeaways:

The 2011 Reno Air Races crash of *The Galloping Ghost*, a highly modified P-51, is widely theorized to have been caused by a trim tab failure following wake turbulence, leading to a violent 11 G pitch-up and the aircraft plunging into spectator stands.
At the extreme speeds of air racing, the trim tab maintained a critical nose-down trim; its failure would cause the elevators to snap to a neutral position, resulting in an uncontrolled pitch-up that likely incapacitated the pilot.
While a similar trim tab failure occurred in 1998 with a different outcome, investigators are examining *The Galloping Ghost*'s extensive modifications and telemetry data to understand why this incident was catastrophic.

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(December 2011) It will be a while before the NTSB issues its findings about the crash of The Galloping Ghost at the Reno Air Races this year. There were so many witnesses, however, and photographic and video coverage of the disastrous accident was so clear, that it did not take long for theorizing about the cause to converge on a single scenario.

The extensively modified P-51 had been involved in racing on and off, with various pilots and under different names, since 1946, but news reports referring to it as a “vintage” airplane, with their suggestion of overall wear and decay, were misleading. It had been crashed, repaired and modified a number of times and was barely recognizable as a P-51. Ten feet had been clipped from its wings and the iconic belly scoop and radiator had been removed altogether, replaced by a tank of water that boiled off during flight and left behind a telltale trail of steam. It was owned and flown by 74-year-old Jimmy Leeward, an Ocala, Florida, real estate developer and an experienced race and stunt pilot.