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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

Crashes are rare. Exposure to the civilian for what their tax dollars are paying for, opportunities for pilots to become more skilled and train other pilots for advanced maneuvers. Things like that. Overall there’s not too much meat on the bone as far as criticisms are concerned.

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Tell that to the people that died or got horribly burned at Ramstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramstein_air_show_disaster

I am not sure what point you are trying to make... are you saying that if anyone is killed in at accident at something, we should never do that something again?

Even more people died at the Hillsborough disaster than died at the Ramstein air show, so I guess we should never have sports events at stadiums anymore.

More people died at the Station Nightclub fire, so I guess we can never have nightclubs anymore.

I could go on and on. Yes, we should take all precautions and be safe as possible for events, but everything has some risk.

That's almost forty years ago. You are basically playing Where's Waldo with military aviation history.

You can do advanced maneuvers without getting so close to another plane in some weird attempt at simulating a scenario that will never happen.

Did some cursory searches/math and it looks like about 1-2% of aerial shows in the US have a fatality (1-2 deaths annually with about 2000 shows on average over the last 20 years). If those numbers are correct (and they may very well not be as it’s a mix of LLM and Google quick searches) 1-2% doesn’t seem worth it.

Edit: I’m an idiot. .05-.1%. Seems a bit silly still but not as bad as I thought.

You might want to double check that LLM... If theres 2000 shows and 1-2 deaths, that's 0.05%-0.1%. still too high, but given the simple math error I think the other numbers are probably suspect too

Don't trust LLMs. They are bullshit machines.

That was my mistake with quick mental math tbh

Also I think most of the fatalities in aerial shows are civilian pilots. Control out every nonmilitary flight when considering the risk.

> You can do advanced maneuvers without getting so close to another plane in some weird attempt at simulating a scenario that will never happen.

That is likely true. However, it is a heck of a demonstration of pilot skill. The Blue Angels somewhat regularly post in-cockpit views of their airshow practice and it is wild how tight a formation they fly; I really recommend seeking out some of those videos, it is totally worth it. Well, for me at least :). It is not unheard of (but not common) for them to inadvertently make contact, since they fly like 18 inches apart, but given they have nearly identical vectors it does not often result in a crash.

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