Death toll rises in Reno air show crash.

the latest on the american hikers, but first, let gets to reno .

a vindage world war ii fighter plane slammed into a grand stand packed with people. here is a p-5 is photo of the impact. there's another photo that suggests what went wrong. it was being flown by this man, a veteran hollywood stunt pilot. george lewis is in reno and has the latest on the deadly clash. george, good morning.

reporter: good morning, lester. a go team is headed to reno this morning to investigate the causes of this tragedy that took the life of the pilot and two others on the ground and sent more than 50 others to the hospital. the moment of the crash was captured on video. the camera picks up other planes racing by the stands at low altitude and then one aircraft plunges into the ground near tend of the stand. organizers of the reno air race called it a mass casualty situation as the aircraft showered debris on the crowd.
everyone started saying uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, he went down, down, down, straight down and exploded.

we saw everything, the plane just splattered.

reporter: in the chaotic aftermath of the crash, emergency responders summoned every ambulance they could to rush the injured to hospitals. the plane in question, a restored world war ii p-51 mustang known as "the galloping ghost." it's unknown at this time what caused the accident.

every pilot understands the risks. they are probably the best pilots in the world.

the pilot, jimmy leeward, 74 years old in an interview thursday morning. he sounded confident about getting through the preliminary heats of the race and getting into the finals.

we're as fast as anybody in the field or maybe even a little faster. to start with, we didn't want to show our hand until saturday or sunday. we've been playing poker since last monday. so it's ready to -- we're ready to show a couple more cards. we're ready to see friday what happened.

reporter: what happened was horrendous. it's unknown whether leeward was trying to take evasive power to avoid the crowd.

if it was in jimmy's power, he would have done everything he could.
should a pilot that old been permitted to fly that plane close to this large number of people?

everything was spot on ask jimmy was a very experienced and qualified pilot.

reporter: the big air race in reno has been compared to nascar. as many as 225,000 turn out for the thrill of watching the pilots pushing their planes to the limit. now, at one point, local hospitals here were running short of blood. the southwest airlines flight we were on last night was held up in las vegas for a while so more blood skies could be loaded.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Death
• toll
• rises
• in
• Reno
• air
• show

[Radi0activ3Cupcak3]

Yep. That plane sure is a ghost now, and unfortunatly the pilot and many onlookers. RIP

[rcoffey0]

thats insane

[MrAluminumMan]

First