Capt. Dale "Snort" Snodgrass + his Sabre
Posted: Tue May 08, 2007 3:51 pm
Ouch!Jet skidded, caught fire at D-M; FAA calls mishap 'pilot induced'
A former Navy Top Gun with decades of flying experience forgot to put his plane's landing gear down during an air show practice run in Tucson in March, the Federal Aviation Administration found.
Retired Capt. Dale "Snort" Snodgrass, a seasoned pro on the military air-show circuit, was piloting a Korean War-era F-86 Sabre that scraped to a stop and caught fire in the March 4 mishap at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
Snodgrass, 57, was given counseling as "corrective action," according to the FAA report, obtained by the Arizona Daily Star under the Freedom of Information Act.
The pilot was unhurt in the incident, which shut down air-show practice at D-M that day. The vintage warplane he was flying, owned by a California air museum, sustained minor damage when one of its wing fuel tanks ignited.
The F-86 was one of dozens of warplanes in Tucson to practice formation flying for the 2006 air-show season. The event was not open to the general public.
Snodgrass remains on the Air Force schedule this season. The service still has "total confidence in his abilities," according to a statement from the Air Combat Command.
Snodgrass, a Florida resident, declined to comment on the FAA finding.
Mike Abraham, a spokesman for CASE, LLC, the Virginia-based defense contractor that hired Snodgrass for the March 4 flight, said the pilot did not want to be interviewed.
It is rare, but not unheard of, for pilots to land without putting their landing gear down, said Arvin Schultz, president of the Phoenix-based Arizona Pilots Association.
"It's something that shouldn't happen, but when it does, the course of action the FAA takes is pretty standard," he said.
If damage is minor and the incident is a simple oversight, discipline usually consists of giving the pilot a talking-to, Schultz said. The lecture would be "kind of demeaning" for a highly accomplished aviator, he said.
Snodgrass, who retired from a 26-year Navy career in 1999, is renowned in the air-show world.
He has 10,000 hours of flight time under his belt, half of them in the F-14 Tomcat, a Navy record for the jet.
In 1985, Snodgrass was a Top Gun graduate and the Navy's Fighter Pilot of the Year. From 1994 to 1997, he was commander of all the Navy's F-14s.
He flew the Tomcat in air shows for more than a decade, and is qualified on at least six other aircraft, including several vintage warplanes.
Retired Air Force Maj. Jack Boileau of Tucson, a former F-86 pilot, said he can't fathom how someone with those credentials could forget such a basic rule of aviation.
"It's hard to believe that a guy with all that experience would not put down his landing gear," said Boileau, adding that the F-86 has warning lights and a cockpit alarm to prevent such a mistake.
The FAA report made no mention of the warning systems. It said the landing problem was "pilot induced."
Because a fire resulted, the D-M mishap "could have been serious," Boileau said.
"It's lucky that things ended as well as they did."
