Wingwalker Dies After Fall At Michigan Air Show

[Purveyor]

(Reuters) - A wingwalker at an air show near Detroit fell to his death on Sunday, after he tried to transfer from an aircraft to a helicopter and plunged about 200 feet to the ground, officials said.

The death of wingwalker Todd Green comes one day after an aerobatic flyer crashed and died at a Kansas City, Missouri, air show and a British Royal Air Force "Red Arrows" pilot crashed and died at an air festival on the coast of England.

Green was flying atop an aircraft at the Selfridge Air Show, less than 30 miles from Detroit, on Sunday when he fell while trying to perform a transfer to a helicopter, organizers said on a website for the event.

MORE...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/21/us-airshow-wingwalker-death-idUSTRE77K2Z420110821

[spanone]

1. She could not provide any information on the cause of death.??????

[Recursion]

8. eg, did he die trying to transfer and fall, or just fall?

There's a lot of very fast moving metal in that trick.

[Purveyor]

11. He missed the transfer and just plain fell. Our local Fox2Detroit is showing video of the entire

mishap.

If you need to see it, look for it.

[Purveyor]

12. Oh BTW to end the parachute discussion...there was none to deploy. eom

[hlthe2b]

2. I can still remember when Karl Wallenda died...

falling off the high wire in Puerto Rico. I thought then that people might lose their obsession with these deadly spectacles and even those who "live" to see a disaster might move on. Clearly, I was wrong. There seems to be no lack of desire to see people die horrific deaths doing unbelievably risky things.

[AsahinaKimi]

3. No parachute just in case?

It would seem a logical item to have in this kind of daring do.

[cloudbase]

4. At 200 feet,

a parachute might only make for a slightly better looking corpse.

[AsahinaKimi]

5. What about this kind?

I don't know anything about skydiving but, it would see like that would work..don't they glide up ward?

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. The time it takes for a parachute to deploy over the distance of 200 feet

would be too long and therefore no help, I should think. :(

[cloudbase]

7. The only way to go up

is to have power or to catch a thermal, much as glider pilots do. Otherwise it's all gravity in action. From that altitude, figure the time to say "oh, shit," add in the time for the 'chute to deploy fully, and it's pretty much over. Those type of 'chutes are highly maneuverable, though.

[AsahinaKimi]

9. How many seconds does it take for the

Chute to deploy fully? Maybe it would be safer for the plane to fly higher..giving the walker a chance to deploy their chute in an emergency.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

10. Depends on the chute

but even the good ones require 300 feet as I recall

[Recursion]

13. I've seen a LALO team do 250 feet (at least they said that's what it was)

But then again they were expecting it.