[condiment]

To give the uninitiated an idea of what happened, whenever a plane at the Reno races experiences a mechanical problem, the pilot points the aircraft vertical and bleeds off all their forward speed. Once they're high enough, they level off and glide to the runway for a landing.

For the 'Unlimited' class of race aircraft, this typically occurs once a day during the races. These aircraft are running 3000hp engines, and race at speeds around 500mph.

Link #3 has the best angle on this maneuver. It looks like the pilot lost control shortly after pulling the plane vertical, after which it rolled 180 degrees and pitched straight to the ground.

[logjam]

Watching link #3, it look like an accelerated maneuver stall: the left wing appears to drop (which I think would be normal stall/spin behavior for clockwise rotating prop) after the abrupt pull up, the aircraft rolls inverted, and there isn't sufficient altitude to recover.

[ktsmith]

Here's a pic of the plane right before the crash: http://cessnateur.blogspot.com/2011/09/reno-crash-trim-tab-t...

[logjam]

The left elevator trim panel looks gone. By itself I wouldn't think that would cause loss of control, but could have precipitated events in a chain often seen in air accidents.

[gvb]

It is probably fully deflected. If it were deflected inadvertently, it would be very difficult to recover control of airplane pitch at the speeds and low altitudes where this occurred.

Another possibility is that the elevator control itself was lost and the pilot is desperately attempting to regain control using the trim tab to control airplane pitch.

[ktsmith]

There's a new picture of the plane (though I can't find it not embedded in video) showing the tab detaching. In the best picture I've seen the tab is perpendicular to the tail and then in the next frame is completely gone.