It happened right in front of us. Thank god it landed correctly but it was in the air for a while. Besides the tips and some damage to the side the boat stayed intact. The one thing that has to be improved and it was an hr or so later was the safety boats. The first boat that ran was Gone Again and there was not one chopper in the air. Also the safety boats they have are not really fast enough to get to a crash site. A bayliner ? Are you serious. I know there partrol boat are 29 ft Donzi's but there are no divers in there. That's one throng they have to put much more into. In a situation like this, every but every second count. I'm hoping for a speedy recovery to Fiore and the driver and a safety run for everyone today.

Moveable flaps and wings have been in use since the late '60s on tunnel hulls and unlimited hydros. They have not stopped crashes which is why you do not see them in widespread use.

they have drasticialy reduced blowovers in unlimited hydros nothing is foolproof but look at nascar with their flap system its not perfect but it does reduce car takeoffs

Any word on how mike is doing as if this morning? Mikes a great guy I couldn't stop thinking about this last night. Hope he and the driver are doing well.
Andy H

While NASCAR roof flaps have been effective they really are designed to keep the car from getting airborne when it spins around 180* & then packs all that air inside & under the hood. Obviously some variation would need to be developed. With cats it almost seems as if you'd need a way to release tunnel pressure thru the deck forward of the helm. NASCAR type flaps on the deck would work b/c if you think about the way they are hinged & how they open they'd have to open forward. Downforce keeps the NASCAR flaps down & air across the roof & hood the opposite direction gets them to deploy.

Just seen the video. Wow, glad they're ok!

getting coffee this morning a dodge neon pulled in next to me he had a 3 foot tall carbon fiber wing mounted on the trunk lid ! i did not know a neon could achive enough speed that they needed a wing to keep her on the ground!. there must be an aerodynamic way to stop these big cat blowovers i think most of the fatalitys involving cats are blowovers and there is a window of time that the nose could be brought back down i,m sure it will need to be computerized but it is possable..........more coffee spilled the first one .....hope the crew is recovering well

The development of most all safety gear and devices over the decades has been reactionary.
To implement wings or flaps to prevent the bow from rising in an offshore boat is very difficult. It obviously can not be controlled by a human since yesterday neither of those men wanted to flip but could not react in a way to prevent it. The first boats with flaps were human controlled and many times resulted in a stuff. Even the early electronics were not able to prevent overcontrolling the pitch of a boat.
Electronics allow us to monitor pitch and rate of change. We have pressure sensors to monitor tunnel and deck pressures. Now how well do they work differentiating a splash from a gust? Filtering those signals would be interesting.
Think about pitch, these boat react to waves with far more pitch change than found in the early stages of a blowover. If every time the bow rose and you dump air how do you stabilize the pitch so the bow does not drop causing a stuff?
Let's say you can find some 25YO kid with an IQ high enough to write an algorithm to stabilize a fast boat at sea with gusty wind, what driver will volunteer to test the system?
I can go on about the issues here but I just want to impress this is not something simple to solve.
Keep in mind even the Spirit of Qatar had its emergency chutes deploy yesterday during a run. That was a noncatastrophic system failure that did no more than blow a speed run. It was still a system failure.
What happens when a wing or flap is wrongly deployed?
Since a 747 was mentioned previously, think about all the Airbus crashes in the past few decades that have been wrongly blamed on pilot error when the rudder went into a computer-induced oscillation causing structural failure in flight. Airbus's new firmware for the flight controller reducing these failures was labeled as "for passenger comfort."

Unfortunately it usually takes an accident or near accident to bring about fixes. Problems do not rear their ugly heads until something fails. I'm sure that something of an automated safety feature could be developed to help prevent a blow over, but at what cost and how effective would it be. Doesn't mean that a furthering of safety equipment should be ignored. Unfortunately when you are running at the speed that they were doing, problems arise very quickly and the time to react is extremely short. Too short for a normal human reaction to correct it. The faster the speed, the infinitely the higher the risk. I am sure they did everything they could in that little of time and thankfully are both alive to dissect this incident which will benefit the boating community as a whole. When watching the first video, it did sound as if they were backing off the throttles as the bow was starting to go up, it was just too late.

CharlieN,

I'm going to guess that you are a pilot as well. While I agree there have been a couple issues with the way software is written for flight controls, look at all the Fly By Wire systems out there, and their complexity, that don't have problems. Take the F-16, -117, -22, B-2, Falcon 7X, B787, etc. We are in an age of technology where this kind of system is "do-able". Heck, the Dept of Transportation is requiring all new cars to be equipped with a stability control system to prevent loss of control. With the miniature sensors that we have and the processing speed available, we are there. Will there be better stuff in 10 years, heck yeah! But we can start now.

That being said, I watched the stream of it. I can't imagine what those of you that were there felt, but it scared the living, well, pretty much everything outta me. All I could say as it happened was "no, no, no, no..."

I'm thankful they're both still with us, and thoughts and prayers for Joel and Mike.