The Air Force Thunderbirds might be the most heavily photographed airplanes in the U.S. military. The Pentagon’s official photography archive lists over 20,000 photos and 500 videos of the team’s pilots and F-16 jets.
But some of the most remarkable images ever released of the demonstration team were made public Monday inside the pages of a formal accident investigation report on the cause of a crash of one of the team’s jets last December.
As the Thunderbird pilot ejected from that crash, less than 500 feet in the air, the plane’s canopy was jettisoned upward by small explosive charges.
Attached to the canopy was a 360-degree video camera. As the canopy rocketed upward from the doomed jet, the camera kept filming.
The images it captured are remarkable.
In a span of just five seconds, the camera captured the pilot rocketing free of the jet from just a few dozen feet away. A second image, looking up through the clear canopy, shows the pilot’s parachute billowing open in midair.
A final image, just seconds later, captures the F-16 impacting the California desert in a massive fireball a few hundred feet below.
The investigation that released the images found that a flaw in the jet’s engine was responsible for the crash, and cleared both the plane’s pilot and the unit’s maintenance crews of any culpability in the mishap. The pilot, whom the Air Force has not identified, landed safely under their parachute and was treated for minor injuries.
Thunderbirds spokesperson Capt. Hannah Durbin told Task & Purpose she could not address details of the crash or the investigation that followed it, but said the 360-degree cameras in the cockpit are a central part of how the team’s pilots prepare for their shows.
“They use them immediately when they come back in after every flight and debrief,” Durbin said. The pilots review the camera’s videos, Durbin said, to check their positions relative to the team’s other jets during a flight and also where along the ground the team had passed over crowds and other landmarks during a show. “They bring the footage in with them [from the jets to a debriefing], and they’ll watch specific parts. I mean, the pilots are pros at flying these maneuvers, right? So they usually have a feeling, ‘hey, maybe I was a little bit off here, or maybe this felt a little bit funky,’ and then that’s when they use the footage to kind of dig further into it.”
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The Thunderbird’s commander, who the team refers to as “Boss” and this season is Lt. Col. Alexander Prevendar, also uses the in-plane videos to plan upcoming shows with an Oculus-style 3-D headset, Durbin said.
“Before we go to a show site, he will pull up the footage from maybe the past Boss who’s flown it,” Durbin said. “He actually uses an Oculus to fly and go through [the flight]. Because everyone else is flying off of Boss, right? Everyone else, they care what the plane next to them looks like and that distance between them and that reference point. Boss is actually flying the lines. So he needs to know, like, no kidding, what it looks like.”
For a recent show in Owensboro, Kentucky, Durbin said Prevendar used the 3-D headsets and cockpit video to gauge the line the team needed to fly over a bridge that spanned a river at the center of the show.
“There’s a giant bridge across the river,” she said. “How does that change our maneuvers?”
The pilots also compare the footage from the cockpit with video taken from the ground.
“You’re just watching it from all angles, right?” Durbin said. “So on the ground, you’re seeing the crowd’s perspective, and what it looks like from show center, versus like in the cockpit, plane to plane, and you’re just using the different reference points to make sure the maneuvers are what they need to be.”
