CAF C-53 "D-Day Doll" Almost Crashed in Xenia, Ohio

Post your airshow-related threads here! For specific airshows, please use the year-specific forum.
Post Reply
awal2049
Posts: 653
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2017 12:00 am
Location: Havelock, NC
Contact:

CAF C-53 "D-Day Doll" Almost Crashed in Xenia, Ohio

Post by awal2049 » Tue Apr 27, 2021 11:00 pm

I just learned about this incident. This past weekend, two CAF warbirds, "That's All Brother!" and "D-Day Doll", were participating in an event in Xenia, Ohio celebrating the 100th birthday of a paratrooper. While departing to return home, "D-Day Doll" had an issue with one of its engines that was not running up correctly. Not sure why, but they decided to take off despite the fault. They ended up aborting the take off, but lost directional control as the tail was coming back down. The result is they rolled off the runway and into the grass. Scary and definitely could have been worse.



Here is a video better explaining the cause of the incident in more detail. Starts about halfway in.

0 x

User avatar
RyanS
Posts: 2886
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 4:50 pm
Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Contact:

Post by RyanS » Tue Apr 27, 2021 11:34 pm

Yikes....glad it ended ok.

When in doubt, stay on the ground.
0 x
Ryan Sundheimer
www.AirshowStuff.com

EricP
Posts: 80
Joined: Mon Feb 13, 2017 12:00 am
Location: Dayton, OH

Post by EricP » Fri Apr 30, 2021 11:59 am

I was there and saw it happen, but my vantage point was the other side of the runway from where this video was shot. I noticed a few puffs of smoke during engine run-up before they took to the runway, but didn't think anything of it until after this happened. It was pretty windy that day also and never seemed to be consistent in terms of the direction they were blowing. I was there to photograph the aircraft and That's All Brother departed just before D-Day Doll for a ride flight. I noticed when photographing D-Day Doll on her take off roll that she started to head more towards where we were standing. Never directly at us, but I could tell something was not right and she rolled through the grass maybe 75 feet in front of us. They came to a stop and then after a minute or so pulled back onto a taxiway. A fairly quick visual inspection for damage was done with the engines still running and then departed from the opposite end of the runway about with no further issue.

After they departed, I did overhear a crew member from Placid Lassie speaking to some airport ground crew and mentioned that with the aircraft loaded with equipment and personnel combined with winds blowing from inconsistent directions in a tail dragger aircraft very well could have been the cause. There were some decent gusts at times so it wouldn't surprise me if they just caught a gust at the worst time. Thankfully the aircraft can handle grass runways and there were no significant dips or bumps in the area they rolled through.
0 x
Eric P.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 23 guests