On Monday, August 3, 2020 at 6:38:25 PM UTC-7, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Sun, 02 Aug 2020 03:39:34 -0700, Paul B wrote:

Great video, there are couple of questions I would ask though.

1) Why did he not turn much tighter to return to the airfield, one
looses much less height in a tight turn that a shallow one? From a tight
turn he might have been able to land downwind. Of course I do not know
what the winds were, or how feasible is to land P-51 downwind.

2) Why did he cross the highway, surely he could have turned base
halfway down the strip and have enough runway to stop.

I thought I'd posted this a day ago, but it evidently didn't make it to
the newsgroup somehow.

I've been to airshows at Duxford, flown gliders past it, flown from there
in a Tiger Moth, and driven past it on the M.11 many times, so I have
some small knowledge of the area. Here's my take:

The formation was joining up on the far side of the motorway when the
P-51s engine had its tizzy. Look at a map or a satpic of the airfield -
the M.11 is almost glued to the east (departure) end of the runway. When
that part of the M.11 was built they chopped 1200ft off the Eastern end
of the runway to keep the road straight.

From the vid it looks as though the formation was joining up a bit North
of the centre line, possibly somewhere near Wittlesford, so when the
engine hiccuped the second time, setting up a left-hand circuit on the
north of the airfield must have looked good. The south side has no
obstacles but (a) it makes the circuit quite a bit longer and (b) it
would have meant crossing the departure end of an active runway.

Turning in early: that would have meant crossing a row of large hangars
and the airshow spectators, which were all along the northern side of the
airfield. In the UK at least, the rules are clear: you DO NOT overfly a
crowd of people below 1000ft AGL under any circumstances - and the P-51
was below that with a dead engine by the time he was past the M.11.

As I said: bring up Duxford Airfield on Google Earth or Google Maps,
compare that with the video shot from the P-51 and draw your own
conclusions.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

What does a P51 have to do with soaring? There are other newsgroups that deal with warbirds.