Bad, bad, bad.  Just outright criminal negligence.  This is really sad to see.  I think you can more or less put a fork in the Collings Foundation as it currently stands.   And I have a feeling that this will be a shot heard through the warbird passenger industry in more ways than one.   Operating costs are already extreme and insurance is already hard enough to obtain.

At the end of the day the operator is always ultimately responsible for the aircraft and all aboard,  but the FAA's hands are not clean either due to their complete lack of oversight.

And it should be a lesson on cockpit culture.  The PIC was the highest time B-17 pilot in the world,   he was also the aircraft's maintenance chief.  The 3 man crew had trouble starting #3 and #4 engines,  both on the same (right) wing (a recipe for disaster should they fail).   They had to blow out both magnetos on both engine 3 and 4 with compressed nitrogen to purge moisture.  Yet they didn't allow the engines time to fully warm up and dry out after finally getting them to start,   didn't perform any engine runup after starting the engines or prior to takeoff,  and committed himself to an intersection departure leaving 3,200 feet of unused runway behind them.

But then you get to the  engine post mortems of #'s 3 and 4, and holy cow...  the scat is about to hit the rotary oscillator.     This is just a sad event all around,  tragic loss of life and lasting injury.

 

Edited December 19, 20205 yr by Waldo Pepper

I checked it out at the time and was actually fairly shocked at how sloppy things seemed to be from the initial report.

I've flown in quite a few 'old bangers' at airshows and such, including some that were way older than that B-17, and I think everyone who ever does that is, or at least should be, aware that there is a possibility things could go awry, but not as a result of a cavalier attitude toward at least trying to make the operation as safe as it could be. It was definitely a case of familiarity breeding contempt and that's not a good place to be on board any aeroplane, especially an old warbird with such a critical Vmc when they absolutely knew there had been engine issues.

Also thinking about the report,  I'm casting doubt on if they performed the preflight mag check on each engine.

Everyone knows the 17 has some control surfaces which are less than brilliant, most notably the ailerons, but there is also the fact that it had a massive rudder and tailfin with a big dorsal fillet added from the D model onwards, and they didn't do that for the looks. True a lot of it was to do with improving bombing stability up at 20,000 feet, but it was also to help keep the thing straight when it was on the ground, and if you are potentially looking at losing a critical engine, or worse maybe even two on the same side, the fact that it has that massive expanse of sheet metal real estate in front of the rudder ought to be telling you that it's not going to end well.