Aerodynamics and the Reno Crash

There is a term of art in aerodynamics known as the "angle of incidence". In essence, this is the difference between the long axis of the aircraft fuselage and the fore-and-aft axis of the wing (where it meets the fuselage. Most airplanes have a positive angle of incidence, especially those with low-mounted wings.

I mention this because there is a relationship between the angle of incidence and the speed at which the airplane will fly with neutral elevator trim. In essence, the airplane "wants" to fly at that speed. If the trim is neutral and the pilot adds power, the airplane will climb. If the pilot reduces power, the airplane will descend, but the airplane will seek to maintain that speed. To go faster, the pilot has to hold the nose down by adding down elevator and to go slower, the pilot has to hold the nose up by adding up elevator.

Obviously, pilots want the airplane to fly in a stable configuration at different speeds. It gets tiring to have to hold pressure to the wheel/stick. That's what the trim-tabs are for. If the pilot wants to fly faster, then nose-down trim is added-- the trim tab sticks up a little and forces the elevator down. If you ever have ridden in a light airplane that has good range of speed between cruise and landing speeds, you may have noticed the pilot adding nose-up trim as the airplane slows.

Now say that you are flying along at a very fast rate of speed. You're going to need to trim the nose down and probably by quite a lot. If the trim tab were to disappear, the airplane will want to climb and it will do that abruptly, for the considerable down-force that has been applied to the elevator by the trim tab is now gone.

Of course, if the airplane happens to be somewhat inverted when that happens, what looks to the airplane as a climb will look to the outside observer as a dive.

The Galloping Ghost had a data recording system and at least one installed camera. The memory cards for those systems may have been recovered. The airplane also transmitted some real-time data to the ground crew during the race and that data is now in the hands of the NTSB.

So even though the airplane pretty much was shredded when it hit that concrete parking ramp, the NTSB may have quite a lot to go on.