A small GA aircraft hitting a drone has a very high fatality chance, particularly in the stages of flight most likely to encounter amateur drone operators (ie. takeoff and landing).

There is nothing special about a war plane that makes it less affected by strikes of any kind, be from birds or drones alike.

A stall in aircraft parlance refers to a change in airflow over the wings or control surfaces that causes the sudden or progressive loss of aerodynamic lift. This is an effect caused by the surface moving through the air at an excessive angle, so that the air stops flowing smoothly over the lifting surface, instead breaking down into a chaotic flow.

Stalls typically happen at low speeds, where an aircraft is pitching up excessively, but can also happen at higher speeds in steep turns or other maneuvers where the g forces on an aircraft make the wings have to support multiple times their normal load.

A midair collision with a small object is unlikely to cause a stall, unless it were to provoke a secondary reaction by the pilot or the control surfaces directly.

Either way, in this case the aircraft in question had the bomber in a blind spot and probably could not see the danger of collision, and in fact may have been frantically looking for it, even lowering the nose to get better visibility, having lost sight of it in a slightly distracted moment.

AFAIK there is no evidence of any condition here aside from inadequate planning, inadequate separation, and pilot error.

As a pilot I am only too aware of the possibility for this kind of accident to occur when operating in the vicinity of other aircraft. It’s surprisingly easy to collide with other aircraft despite the huge amount of empty space lol around you.

It usually takes a few confounding factors to line up to cause disasters to occur in aviation… it’s almost never just one or two.

You're oddly barking up the wrong tree by complaining about a genuine pilot's non-sponsored youtube channel to recommend a website that is passenger focused.

It's like complaining about a scientific journal having too many words and recommending the Yahoo! Health article instead. It's a different audience.

You can find the long form narrative boring. That's ok. There is no right way to tell a story.

Matt Guthmiller also has some recent videos on getting an L-39 up and running, and his first flights in it.

Edit: to add a little to this since I started thinking about it, while the total flight time seems fairly low, we would go fly in absolutely any weather short of an actual thunderstorm, and the IPs for the most part made the students do the flying/navigating/communicating/planning/etc. Flying close formation in drafty clouds with pounding rain would humble a low-time pilot, and occasionally it'd be bad enough to get a grunt out of the mostly drowsing (it seemed) graybeard in the backseat. My last assignment in the AF was to go teach UPT (at the base I learned at), and hoo boy, did I see that the vast majority of the stress that the students underwent was mostly self-induced and the flying was about as basic as we could do - it just seemed (and was) hard for the students because we all were so, to paraphrase a great philosopher, unknowing about our unknowns.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll do fine learning to fly the L-39. It's a popular and comparatively affordable jet airplane I understand and looks like fun.

Doubly-so if it's a several pound metal ball...

You don't want to hit anything in an aircraft, ever.

There's no particular reason for wikipedia to mention it because it was a very common feature in this era. It would be like mentioning that it had self-sealing fuel tanks. It was also a feature that could be present or not between different models, and could even be retrofitted to a plane once it was in service.

Regarding the wreck-finder below: he likely does know exactly what it was because he likely started by looking up the crash report (and based on his claimed date, it's probably s/n, 44-2031)

This is exactly what a typical armored windscreen looked like in this era (e.g. https://ww2aircraft.net/forum/threads/armored-windscreen-for...)

Thank you! For what it's worth, it really shows! The vast majority of L39 videos online are low effort vanity dumps from hangar to hangar taken by a GoPro or two poorly positioned in the cockpit - you can rarely see the instrumentation, checklists, or anything remotely useful.

Your video towers above others. With the amount of cockpit detail visible in the main 3rd person view and in the B-roll like the red levers. Your hands visible on the throttle and stick so it's easy to see what you're doing and when the instructor has control. Beautiful exterior view from the wing during simulated emergencies and landing gear retractions. Down to the instructor's commentary during the nose tracking exercise with visible turbulence. Oh and most of the time, glare permitting, I can make out all of the gauges! ALL IN 4K!

The classroom videos are just icing on the cake with a cherry on top. One thing I didn't quite get though... what was the strap thing? :)

> My recommendation is, 1) get your instrument rating and fly IFR enough to get comfortable doing that, 2) get some aerobatic lessons, including some unusual attitude recoveries, in any aerobatic plane, even if it's a Cessna 152 Aerobat, and 3) get some hours in a fast, slippery plane that requires you to plan your descents from 30+ miles out; could be a Cirrus, a Columbia, a Mooney, a Lancair, or a Bonanza, etc. Retractable experience is a plus too (get 10-20 hours in a Piper Arrow or something). And be prepared to pay for it all!

Pretty much the plan I had, though I was planning to do aerobatic training with CP Aviation focusing on recoveries (I'm not an adrenaline junkie, just paranoid) before jumping into IFR. Any reason to do IFR before aerobatics?

A Mooney with long range tanks has been my plan for years because it would allow me to visit family in a single hop with a reasonable enough travel time to do it every other weekend (easy 5-10 hours per week), so that's encouraging. Once again, thank you!

Side note: how tall are you, if I may ask? That cockpit is cramped.

I tell everyone these things are not for kids, especially the $1K+ drones capable of high altitudes and speeds. If you go online and find a video of someone doing something stupid, you’ll find an army of enthusiasts telling them so in the comments because they want to preserve the hobby.

We do have confirmed strikes from drones, and the damage has been devastating. We do have confirmed strikes with fatalities from birds. There is not much difference between a bird and a drone when an aircraft strikes it at speed...

These drones are often operated by folks with zero training and zero deference for the law or aviation safety (highlighted by the fact they're operating near an airport). It's just a matter of time... if it hasn't already happened right here in this Dallas incident.

That's because there have not been any: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_aerial_vehicl...

It's unclear whether it's the same chance hitting a bird has. You assert it is.

As to a high chance of fatality from bird strike: no. There's >10k bird strikes per year in the US and most years there isn't a single bird strike related fatal accident. Estimates of death are on the order of 1 death related to bird strike per billion flight hours.

Even if drones are the same risk per collision, drones are much rarer near runways than birds.

There's no such thing in the world as zero risk, but if drones are a small fraction of a risk that's less than 1 death per billion flight hours, I'd say that we have bigger fish to fry.

Sure there is. On average there are about 13000 bird strikes a year. What fraction of those result in a fatality? The FAA says a bit under 400 pilots die every year, however since 1990 there have been just 292 fatalities globally that can be attributed to wildlife strikes (and not all are birds).

That is a pretty clear repudiation of any claim that hitting a drone has a "high chance of being fatal."