B52 Hot Dogging and Crash

I went to flight school for a time and for those of you who don't fly, aircraft have performance specs - a "performance envelope" - i.e. certain agles at certain speeds and altitudes with payloads and fuel loads not to exceed.  There's a saying in the flight community "there are old pilots and bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots."  Even fighter pilots learn the performance envelope of their aircraft and work very hard to keep within that envelope across a wide variety of situations. 

Anyways, this is a compilation of B-52 footage showing a pilot breaking the rules and flight directives and taking the plane outside its performance envelope for years before and you'll probably be surprised what a B-52 can do....on his last day right in front of his family gathered to watch him prepare to retire.....it finally happened! 



Here's an F-16 going through the paces with a bird strike if you haven't seen it - one of the first things you start to learn to do in flying is actually to crash.




And here is a helicopter pilot on a U.S. Navy ship coming in too fast and not paying attention and well....you can see how it turns out......I know the Navy has a bad rap among the other armed forces as not being a real armed force, but it's constantly busy on the ship and anything can go wrong at any time requiring you to jump out of your rack in the middle of your sleep to man your station......it's very very busy out at sea. 




Here's just for fun a video of the USS Kittyhawk (Dad served on her too) and the waterline to the flight deck is around 60 feet.......yeah......good stuff.   The only things I can think of as I was watching this are: I know its even worse on the cruisers and destroyers around the carrier AND this is why Navy aircraft wear out faster than Air Force equipment in general in addition to the beating they take landing and taking off on a carrier.