Air show pilots emphasize safety in performances
Air show safety recently has come in to focus after the deaths of several pilots, performers and even spectators in the U.S. and Europe. The community of people who put on air shows are making an effort to explain that there is some risk in the form of entertainment, but there are also specific rules designed to keep people safe.
"With the air show community and working with the FAA and the DOD, we've mitigated a lot of that risk in our industry," said David Schultz, an organizer of the Atlantic City Air Show. "There are stringent rules both in Canada and the United States with regards to show lines as well as to areas where they can fly, energy directed toward the crowd."
Schultz explained, "The European standards are not near as strict as what we have here in the United States."
CBS News' Vladimir Duthiers went up in the air with the Navy's elite Blue Angels squad, which executes combat techniques that are demonstrated at air shows.
"We do what we call a crawl-walk-run mentality where we start out with very basic level and it progresses and progresses until eventually you've got a flight demonstration in the form of an air show that you can deliver as a safe, homogeneous product all over the country," said Capt. Jeff Kuss, a Blue Angels pilot. "It's all going to be relatively similar."