By lex, on July 26th, 2006

There are few words so immediately blood-chilling in their effect upon tactical aviators as these: “mid-air.” It is an abbreviation for “mid-air collision,” and conjures up images of once sleek, purposeful and lethal high performance aircraft reduced in a moment to odd pieces of flaming trash, fluttering to earth – instant chaos from order.

Mention news of a mid-air and prepare yourself for the customary, almost involuntary response: “Did anyone get out?”

There are many ways to die in fighters. The most common is controlled flight into terrain, or CFIT. It’s a long term that essentially boils down to “dummy flew too low.” While we can and do mourn people who die this way, we also have a tendency to shrug a bit, mentally. After all, you can only tie the low altitude record, you can’t beat it. Should have known better.

Mid-airs can occur between flight members, as someone’s attention drifts or gets over-channelized; the wingman has primary collision avoidance responsibility, but a poor flight lead can certainly contribute by behaving unpredictably in a moment when a flight is task-saturated.

They can occur in a slow-speed fight, when the aircraft are performing at their aerodynamic limits and nothing is left to draw upon when one or both combatants miscalculate the vector – these can have a slow motion, nightmarish character of inescapable and imminent doom that hasn’t quite happened yet. One pilot may survive such a collision, much more rarely both will. The aircraft themselves, of course, are almost always destroyed.

But the third and most lethal form of mid-air collision is the head-on. No one ever survives a head-on collision. Closure rates are so very high that the moment is over before conscious thought can form, and the forces are catastrophic. And I think that’s what so frightening about the head-on mid-air: pilots are essentially control freaks, accustomed to being in charge of their destinies. But in the moment you realize that you are approaching a head-on collision, a moment that transitions seamlessly between “in control, looking good” to a red wave of panic, there is often only one chance to escape, one last-ditch move and whether or not you live through the next instant will depend entirely upon what the other guy does: If his reaction mirrors yours, it will mean instant, unknowing death.

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Twenty three years ago I lost five of my very best friends in a mid-air collision.  It was a beautiful sunny winters day and they climbed into my friends Cessna 182 to make a skydive.  The plane they were in was the one that I normally flew but I’d been on a skiing trip that weekend and had just pulled up to the dropzone as they were taking off with the plane being flown by one of my best friends.  They didn’t get far.  Climbing out at five hundred feet their plane was struck by an instructor and his student flying a Piper Cherokee on a training flight.  Even though everyone on the jump plane was wearing parachutes no one made it out.  I’ve replayed what it must have looked like being at the controls of the jump plane in my head a thousand times.  If it had been me at the controls would the outcome have been different?  Or would I have been just as distracted or complacent and not seen the black shape in the windscreen getting larger and larger until it was too late?  I’ll never know.