Reader A. M. recently came across my post from November last year showing an extremely low pass by a Harvard training aircraft over a group of Army trainees along South Africa’s western coast. She e-mailed me to ask whether I knew anything about a very low pass by a Portuguese airliner during an air show in that country. She’d heard of it, but wanted to know whether it had really happened.
It most certainly did happen! An Airbus A310 of Portuguese national airline TAP performed several dangerously low passes at the 2007 Evora air show. Here are two video clips of the incident.
I don’t know if they fired the pilot for that bit of insanity . . . but if he’d done that in the USA I imagine the FAA would have yanked his license at once, if not sooner!
Peter
I've seen this on several other sites and it reminds me of the stunt the French pilot pull (unsuccessfully) a number of years ago.
Air France Flight 296 was a chartered flight of a newly-delivered fly-by-wire Airbus A320 operated by Air France. On June 26, 1988, as part of an air show it was scheduled to fly over Mulhouse-Habsheim Airport (ICAO code LFGB) at a low speed with landing gear down at an altitude of 100 feet, but instead slowly descended to 30 feet before crashing into the tops of trees beyond the runway.
Three passengers died.
The cause of the accident is disputed, as many irregularities were later revealed by the accident investigation.
CAUSE: Seems like the "computer" thought the plane was landing when the pilot tried for a low pass. The computer commanded a nose-up "flare" which resulted in a stall and crash.
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCwYAzqvcrQ
Peter, this is NOT the first instance of Latin machismo, this one just happened to end up NOT killing anybody…
What struck me was less the low pass than the attempt to turn while that low and seeing the wing nearly touching the ground.
MechAg94
http://something-interesting4u.blogspot.de/2009/12/tap-airbus-a310-low-pass-turn-portugal.html
Additional info.