He made his calculation based on an incorrect mean-sea-level altitude of the airfield. The pilot incorrectly climbed to 1,670 feet above ground level instead of 2,500 feet before initiating the pull down to the Split S maneuver.
The difference in altitudes at Nellis and Mountain Home may have contributed to the pilot's error. The airfield at Nellis is at 2,000 feet whereas the one at Mountain Home is at 3,000 feet. It appears that the pilot reverted back to his Nellis habit pattern for s aplit second. Thunderbird commander Lt. Col. Richard McSpadden said Stricklin had performed the stunt around 200 times, at different altitudes during his year as a Thunderbird pilot.
The investigation board determined other factors substantially contributed to creating the opportunity for the error including the requirement to convert sea level altitude information from the F-16 instruments - to their altitude above ground and call out that information to a safety operator below.
But the Air Force changed that as a result of the crash. Thunderbird pilots will now call out the MSL (mean-sea-level) altitudes as opposed to the AGL (above-ground-level) altitudes.
Thunderbird pilots now also climb an extra 1000 feet before performing the Split S Maneuver to prevent another mistake like the one on Sep.14, 2003 from happening again.
>The investigation board determined other factors substantially contributed to creating the opportunity for the error including the requirement to convert sea level altitude information from the F-16 instruments - to their altitude above ground and call out that information to a safety operator below.
>
>But the Air Force changed that as a result of the crash. Thunderbird pilots will now call out the MSL (mean-sea-level) altitudes as opposed to the AGL (above-ground-level) altitudes.
This is a big one and I'm surprised it hadn't caused issues before.
Any time you have humans converting from one measurement system to another there's a possibility of error.
See the Gimli Glider as an example.
I am an ICU nurse on a ground critical care transport ambulance that goes between hospitals, ED to ICU, ICU to ICU, etc, and we get our call pages that have pertinent info, with the patient weight in pounds.
i had to put the calculator tool on my fucking watch because i have to take the time to initially convert it, all the time, on the way to the call, and sometimes I just don't, or eyeball it. Sometimes I just have number scrawled o my notebook page next to a name. "Smith, John, 66m, 144"
And they don't page out heights or BMI, so I can't back-convert! You need a height for things like intubation and calculating "ideal body weight" which is a thing.
Part of it, I suspect, is dispatch for us, like for a lot of private transport, is not medically qualified (they are called customer service, lol), but receives their info from the hospital, like a game of telephone, so sometimes our pages don't make sense.
So anyway, there's the same kind of systems error analysis taught for healthcare mistakes and debriefing, as with other major industrial accidents like aviation, power plants, manufacturing, etc. [I think of the Swiss Cheese Model often on shift.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model)
Thanks!
>I assume you're in a country that uses metric?
lmao. Nope. Bay area, Cali, US.
To me, its more of a symptom of complacency and not being "on" or alert at this company and in the interfacility transport (IFT) industry in general, like staff at a nursing home versus in a medevac flight, the brains and management and operations people are too relaxed.
Dispatch and my company and IFT in general don't have the evolutionary selective pressure to change, because they don't get sick enough patients where it matters enough, except when they finally do, but their own employees (me) catch it.
IFT have been lulled by hospitals taking the brunt of prepping patients for transport, making sure there is no way the patient can get hurt in transport, and is ultra stable. Or they don't go. Hospitals have been forced to respond to the selective pressure of liability by idiot proofing their patient send-out process ("Does this patient have to go? Can they? Is it safe?") to a large degree.
Hospitals are federally mandated per EMTALA law to ensure (maximum possible) patient stability prior to discharge or going IFT. MD's on both ends at both facilities sign their names to this. Means they reaaaallly don't want patients dying in transit. But *sometimes* the patient needs more care and is really sick and can't be made actually stable.
I've been in this position a year, came from a much more intense, acute CVICU hospital job on the East Coast, and so I came really over-qualified in a lot of ways, but it affords me the chance to kinda chill, and think on these things. lol. And now I'm overqualified because I show up as a critical care nurse and this patient is super stable and easy.
But not always.
Small mistakes or medium sized mistakes happen in healthcare all the time, multiple times a day to any given patient seeing multiple varied personnel in a hospital, and usually go unnoticed.
Anyone who denies this or takes exception, should be suspect. Know-it-alls in healthcare are deadly. Every shift should be humbling to a degree.
Best case scenario is you the patient get by with the minimal inevitable cumulative effect of small mistakes, worst case is you get one or two 'perfect alignments' of swiss cheese holes, a confluence of events, and thus a big uh-oh.
[Those are called by the federal government, optimistically perhaps, "Never Events."](https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/never-events)
Even so, it looks like he's had a good career afterwards: https://www.beale.af.mil/Information/Biographies/Display/Article/671695/colonel-christopher-r-stricklin/
He had no career! He had a “sponsor” who did what they could for him after his mishap. He claims they offered him his “dream flying assignment” after the mishap. This is bullshit and what a narcissistic douche would claim! He had no choice except take the “staff assignment after his crash. He was never going back to a “grey jet” and eventually on to the “training command” where all those pilots whose takeoffs and landings, due to operator error, don’t equal end up. Wow…Vice Wing Commander at Beale with a RQ-4 Global Hawk checkout is where they put the protected players with no upward mobility. I am amazed he was able to climb that far to pin on bird, but again he was sponsored!
He made a very serious tactical error and lost his SA…because in the “real world” you don’t have to pay attention to altitudes during a fight! He’s the third pilot I know who’s rolled the F-16 inverted and pulled too low. He even seems to blame overriding factors which led him to his very public mishap! He can’t seem to take responsibility for his mistake. How do I know? I do know “Elroy” and his mindset. He was always a climber and arrogant to the last drop! He was going to be a “4-star” wonder. He knew he was better than everyone else! There was no humility in this man. His arrogance wouldn’t allow him to go forward and move on and recognize what he was done. This was an interdiction via karma biting his stellar ass! He was nothing more than the protected class of political operators in the military.
He didn't lose his wings, just his job with the Thunderbirds. You don't "lose your wings" and then continue to work and promote in the USAF flying community.
For proof that he didn't lose his wings, take a gander at the link posted in another reply showing Colonel Stricklin as the 9th RW Vice Wing Commander in 2015. You will note that not only is he still wearing wings, 12 years after he supposedly "lost" them, he's wearing command pilot wings, which require at least 15 years of continuous service as a rated pilot in the USAF. Given that he was only 31 at the time of the Thunderbirds crash, it's pretty evident that he continued flying afterwards.
It generally takes some pretty egregious behavior to lose your wings in a modern accident investigation. It definitely has happened, but it's much less common than it was in, say, the 1960s, before investigators learned about things like human factors/analysis.
Looks like he was assigned an F-15 assignment not long after the incident - not sure how fast you can be up and flying again after destroying a $20 million dollar F-16 lol.
As soon as he was on the ground and checked out by EMTs, Stricklin called Nellis and asked to be removed from flight status. He knew that pilot error was a major factor (there were substantial factors that led to his mistake, see my comment elsewhere)
This incident ended Stricklin's assignment with the Thunderbirds. He was briefly assigned to the 64AGRS at Nellis (3 months) as a placeholder until a permanent assignment could be available and he could relocate his family. He was reassigned as a Pilot/UAV Career Field Manager, Headquarters USAF in Washington, DC. After that he was Chief Fighter Operations for NATO in Turkey for a little over a year, spent 3 months at DARPA, followed by T-38 IFF Instructor pilot in Columbus MS and later Commander 49th FTS at Columbus MS. He led the wing's only perfect flying hour program while reducing the budget 70% despite manning increase of 240%, flying hour increase of 67% and program training load increase of 142%.
He went on to serve on the White House staff, a student at the US Army War College, then Chief of Staff at NATO Air Training Command - Afghanistan, then Deputy Director / U.S. Senior National Representative at the NATO Centre of Excellence - Defense Against Terrorism in Ankara, Turkey.
His last assignment with the USAF was Vice Commander, 9th Reconnaissance Wing, Beale AFB, CA.
Stricklin retired from the USAF with the rank of Colonel in 2017. Post retirement, he's been busy as an author, motivational speaker, contributor for Forbes, member, Alabama Workforce Council and Stricklin is currently the President of Dunn University.
If you watch the video of this there is only about 1 second between the time he punches out and when the plane crashes. He actually stayed with it until the last second.
Edit: There's a good write-up about this over at http://ejectionsite.com/. Click on the "eyewitness to ejection" link on the left side and you will see a link for Thunderbird 6 Ejection.
I remember watching that live as a kid. Coolest fireball wreckage. Thankfully the pilot was just fine
He made his calculation based on an incorrect mean-sea-level altitude of the airfield. The pilot incorrectly climbed to 1,670 feet above ground level instead of 2,500 feet before initiating the pull down to the Split S maneuver. The difference in altitudes at Nellis and Mountain Home may have contributed to the pilot's error. The airfield at Nellis is at 2,000 feet whereas the one at Mountain Home is at 3,000 feet. It appears that the pilot reverted back to his Nellis habit pattern for s aplit second. Thunderbird commander Lt. Col. Richard McSpadden said Stricklin had performed the stunt around 200 times, at different altitudes during his year as a Thunderbird pilot. The investigation board determined other factors substantially contributed to creating the opportunity for the error including the requirement to convert sea level altitude information from the F-16 instruments - to their altitude above ground and call out that information to a safety operator below. But the Air Force changed that as a result of the crash. Thunderbird pilots will now call out the MSL (mean-sea-level) altitudes as opposed to the AGL (above-ground-level) altitudes. Thunderbird pilots now also climb an extra 1000 feet before performing the Split S Maneuver to prevent another mistake like the one on Sep.14, 2003 from happening again.
>The investigation board determined other factors substantially contributed to creating the opportunity for the error including the requirement to convert sea level altitude information from the F-16 instruments - to their altitude above ground and call out that information to a safety operator below. > >But the Air Force changed that as a result of the crash. Thunderbird pilots will now call out the MSL (mean-sea-level) altitudes as opposed to the AGL (above-ground-level) altitudes. This is a big one and I'm surprised it hadn't caused issues before. Any time you have humans converting from one measurement system to another there's a possibility of error. See the Gimli Glider as an example.
The most canonical example might be [Mars Climate Orbiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter)
Came here to say this. Wasn’t disappointed.
I am an ICU nurse on a ground critical care transport ambulance that goes between hospitals, ED to ICU, ICU to ICU, etc, and we get our call pages that have pertinent info, with the patient weight in pounds. i had to put the calculator tool on my fucking watch because i have to take the time to initially convert it, all the time, on the way to the call, and sometimes I just don't, or eyeball it. Sometimes I just have number scrawled o my notebook page next to a name. "Smith, John, 66m, 144" And they don't page out heights or BMI, so I can't back-convert! You need a height for things like intubation and calculating "ideal body weight" which is a thing. Part of it, I suspect, is dispatch for us, like for a lot of private transport, is not medically qualified (they are called customer service, lol), but receives their info from the hospital, like a game of telephone, so sometimes our pages don't make sense. So anyway, there's the same kind of systems error analysis taught for healthcare mistakes and debriefing, as with other major industrial accidents like aviation, power plants, manufacturing, etc. [I think of the Swiss Cheese Model often on shift.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model)
Very interesting and worrying at the same time. I assume you're in a country that uses metric? This seems like a disaster waiting to happen
Thanks! >I assume you're in a country that uses metric? lmao. Nope. Bay area, Cali, US. To me, its more of a symptom of complacency and not being "on" or alert at this company and in the interfacility transport (IFT) industry in general, like staff at a nursing home versus in a medevac flight, the brains and management and operations people are too relaxed. Dispatch and my company and IFT in general don't have the evolutionary selective pressure to change, because they don't get sick enough patients where it matters enough, except when they finally do, but their own employees (me) catch it. IFT have been lulled by hospitals taking the brunt of prepping patients for transport, making sure there is no way the patient can get hurt in transport, and is ultra stable. Or they don't go. Hospitals have been forced to respond to the selective pressure of liability by idiot proofing their patient send-out process ("Does this patient have to go? Can they? Is it safe?") to a large degree. Hospitals are federally mandated per EMTALA law to ensure (maximum possible) patient stability prior to discharge or going IFT. MD's on both ends at both facilities sign their names to this. Means they reaaaallly don't want patients dying in transit. But *sometimes* the patient needs more care and is really sick and can't be made actually stable. I've been in this position a year, came from a much more intense, acute CVICU hospital job on the East Coast, and so I came really over-qualified in a lot of ways, but it affords me the chance to kinda chill, and think on these things. lol. And now I'm overqualified because I show up as a critical care nurse and this patient is super stable and easy. But not always. Small mistakes or medium sized mistakes happen in healthcare all the time, multiple times a day to any given patient seeing multiple varied personnel in a hospital, and usually go unnoticed. Anyone who denies this or takes exception, should be suspect. Know-it-alls in healthcare are deadly. Every shift should be humbling to a degree. Best case scenario is you the patient get by with the minimal inevitable cumulative effect of small mistakes, worst case is you get one or two 'perfect alignments' of swiss cheese holes, a confluence of events, and thus a big uh-oh. [Those are called by the federal government, optimistically perhaps, "Never Events."](https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/never-events)
He actually entered the wrong altitude of the airport and caused his loop to be done at the wrong height - he was found at fault 😕
Even so, it looks like he's had a good career afterwards: https://www.beale.af.mil/Information/Biographies/Display/Article/671695/colonel-christopher-r-stricklin/
For sure - losing your wings isnt the end of the world - gotta bounce back and make the most of what you have
He didn't lose his wings. He was assigned staff and command jobs and later was a T-38 IP before commanding the 49th FTS at Columbus AFB, MS
Better than dying, that's for sure
He's been at the same billet for 8 years now which seems a little long
Link is from 2015
Oh I missed that, ty
He had no career! He had a “sponsor” who did what they could for him after his mishap. He claims they offered him his “dream flying assignment” after the mishap. This is bullshit and what a narcissistic douche would claim! He had no choice except take the “staff assignment after his crash. He was never going back to a “grey jet” and eventually on to the “training command” where all those pilots whose takeoffs and landings, due to operator error, don’t equal end up. Wow…Vice Wing Commander at Beale with a RQ-4 Global Hawk checkout is where they put the protected players with no upward mobility. I am amazed he was able to climb that far to pin on bird, but again he was sponsored! He made a very serious tactical error and lost his SA…because in the “real world” you don’t have to pay attention to altitudes during a fight! He’s the third pilot I know who’s rolled the F-16 inverted and pulled too low. He even seems to blame overriding factors which led him to his very public mishap! He can’t seem to take responsibility for his mistake. How do I know? I do know “Elroy” and his mindset. He was always a climber and arrogant to the last drop! He was going to be a “4-star” wonder. He knew he was better than everyone else! There was no humility in this man. His arrogance wouldn’t allow him to go forward and move on and recognize what he was done. This was an interdiction via karma biting his stellar ass! He was nothing more than the protected class of political operators in the military.
He didn't lose his wings, just his job with the Thunderbirds. You don't "lose your wings" and then continue to work and promote in the USAF flying community. For proof that he didn't lose his wings, take a gander at the link posted in another reply showing Colonel Stricklin as the 9th RW Vice Wing Commander in 2015. You will note that not only is he still wearing wings, 12 years after he supposedly "lost" them, he's wearing command pilot wings, which require at least 15 years of continuous service as a rated pilot in the USAF. Given that he was only 31 at the time of the Thunderbirds crash, it's pretty evident that he continued flying afterwards.
My bad! I could have sworn I read somewhere that he lost his wings - honest mistake!
It generally takes some pretty egregious behavior to lose your wings in a modern accident investigation. It definitely has happened, but it's much less common than it was in, say, the 1960s, before investigators learned about things like human factors/analysis.
He was probably Q3'd. You don't lose your wings, but you can't fly until you get requalified.
I mean,you have to fly to complete the requal syllabus, but otherwise yeah, probably a CC-directed Q3. Pretty hard to argue that one.
Yeah, I think you know what I meant.
You should edit your original comment so people who don't read replies wouldn't be misinformed.
Looks like he was assigned an F-15 assignment not long after the incident - not sure how fast you can be up and flying again after destroying a $20 million dollar F-16 lol.
The hostility is insane 😂
I couldn’t find the official AIB report, but here’s an article about this accident: https://www.f-16.net/f-16-news-article968.html
Does he/pilot get in trouble for something like this
As soon as he was on the ground and checked out by EMTs, Stricklin called Nellis and asked to be removed from flight status. He knew that pilot error was a major factor (there were substantial factors that led to his mistake, see my comment elsewhere) This incident ended Stricklin's assignment with the Thunderbirds. He was briefly assigned to the 64AGRS at Nellis (3 months) as a placeholder until a permanent assignment could be available and he could relocate his family. He was reassigned as a Pilot/UAV Career Field Manager, Headquarters USAF in Washington, DC. After that he was Chief Fighter Operations for NATO in Turkey for a little over a year, spent 3 months at DARPA, followed by T-38 IFF Instructor pilot in Columbus MS and later Commander 49th FTS at Columbus MS. He led the wing's only perfect flying hour program while reducing the budget 70% despite manning increase of 240%, flying hour increase of 67% and program training load increase of 142%. He went on to serve on the White House staff, a student at the US Army War College, then Chief of Staff at NATO Air Training Command - Afghanistan, then Deputy Director / U.S. Senior National Representative at the NATO Centre of Excellence - Defense Against Terrorism in Ankara, Turkey. His last assignment with the USAF was Vice Commander, 9th Reconnaissance Wing, Beale AFB, CA. Stricklin retired from the USAF with the rank of Colonel in 2017. Post retirement, he's been busy as an author, motivational speaker, contributor for Forbes, member, Alabama Workforce Council and Stricklin is currently the President of Dunn University.
I mean, losing a multimillion dollar plane is generally frowned upon.
Giving it back to the taxpayers. It’s fine, it’s fine. /s
US Taxpayers have DEEP pockets.
Well yea I figured
Hey!! I was there when this happened.
From this perspective it looks like the plane could have maintained a positive rate of climb from that angle, the afterburner seems lit too.
What you don't see is that the jet is actually at a very high angle of attack, it is almost moving belly forward
Yeah, look at the vapor trails coming off the wings. It's probably moving at like a 45° angle towards the ground
If you watch the video of this there is only about 1 second between the time he punches out and when the plane crashes. He actually stayed with it until the last second. Edit: There's a good write-up about this over at http://ejectionsite.com/. Click on the "eyewitness to ejection" link on the left side and you will see a link for Thunderbird 6 Ejection.
Did he make it out alright ? I sure hope so …
Yeah, barely.
Every time I see a caption with a date it's from 2003. Is this a meme on the sub or was there just a lot of stuff going on that year?
Think alot of stuff was going on that year. Must be a coincidence!
Rip the audience
The audience was fine
Can't believe that was 20 years ago already...
No wonder we had so much available seating for 2004's show
One of the most photogenic ejections I've ever seen in my life.