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.

airbags in cars deploy without human intervention and are still evolving but do indeed save lives lets keep and open mind here aero control is not the only way to change angle of attack or sudden bow lift RMs (reaction motors) in the bow facing up might be worth a look here they control many rockets and a few expermental aircraft they have been around a long time and come in a wide variety of thrust the space shuttle had many from a few pounds thrust to thousands

the only silver lining in this is that it landed right side up. One of the occupants was taken out on a board to prevent further injury. Could you imagine putting him on a board underwater. The only experience I have similar is I went end over and in a car with 241 rear end gears turning 8000 rpm. And I have done capsule training. Both are extremely scary. Add both of these to see what these guys are dealing with are. can't imagine

When your going as fast as a Unlimited Hydro then we should have the same type of capsule, auxiliary air, and escape hatches as they do, along with that proper rescue crews meaning divers. Your never going to prevent that kind of accident from happening so make the boat as safe if possible. That boat did a good job considering it was kind of a pleasure boat. Also a Hans device would be advised as well. I am pretty sure the Unlimited Hydro drivers wear them. Seems like a lot to do but when your going that fast do everything possible to survive a crash.

On the LOTO Shootout feed a few minutes ago Bob Teague said that Mike Fiore's wife personally called him and said that as of this morning Mike was conscious and responsive, not in a comma, and while he's not out of woods yet they expect him to recover. Joel is banged up but not seriously injured.

So glad to hear.

I agree. Unlimiteds have the trap door on the bottom of the boat and the f 16 tiger mask as well

If the victim is underwater you would skip the board and just get them to the surface!

Great news!

just remember a lot of "rocket technology" is one time use, car airbags last the life of the vehicle in most cases and boating is a pretty tough environment to make technology/equipment survive in!

+1 I heard similar good news!

Upside down and stern-first is actually the best possible re-entry in an incident like this. Final upright position also could not be more fortunate. Any sudden deceleration facing forward at this speed could result in a ruptured aorta and sudden death, as well as significant cervical spine injury. Sideways impact would also be devastating at this speed. Looks like the rescue teams did a great job getting the crew out.

Thoughts and prayer to all involved.

Thats good news!!!

I think the answer as I stated isn't making cats more stable. If your here, your one of us, type A people. We push things.

If you make the cat more stable, Type A people simply add more power and go faster until its unstable again, thats what we do, thats who we are.

What needs to be researched, designed and built is a safety capsule that doesnt blow apart and protects its occupants, Hatches that stay inact, windows that stay intact etc.

You can lock a bunch of rocket scientests and composite engineers in a room until they design a completely stable 250 mph boat. As soon as they leave the room and proclaim "we did it" somebody is going to find a propulsion system to make it go 300mph unleashing a whole new set of problems.Meanwhile the daredevils piloting them are relying on safety systems that are failing at half that speed.

Terrific news that Mike is recovering. I am just amazed that the boat held together so well. On this evidence alone, I wouldn't hesitate to buy an Outerlimits.

Great news!!! Good luck to both !! Hello Mike, Man! What a ride!! Hang in there! Call if you need a airplane or whatever to get home if you can fly without a medical crew. Call me when you can. Jim

Another video of the crash I had not seen. Sorry if its a repost. Good LORD they were up there a LONG time. Long enough to think about what was happening. A good 6 full seconds from oh **** to the hard landing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ubukX0ZgtI

Unbelievable that anyone could survive that.

Never seen a blowover that BIG even in hydroplane racing.

Although this may be correct for the human body, unfortunately this is not true for the boat around that human body. Remember who died a few years ago when their boat went in like that at Key West. The force of all that water coming in from behind blew out the bulkheads behind the crew compartment - leading to a fatality.

The plain and simple fact is that surviving a crash (in a boat) at over 150 MPH is doubtful at best. And that would be in a full race boat. Note that virtually all of the windows were blown out of the OL in this crash - because the really big impact was the next to the last hit - on the side. The last hit was when the boat flipped (fortunately) flipped upright.

shouldnt matter which way the boat hits the water or how fast. THe canopy shouldnt give, the windows shouldn't blow out.

Thoughts and prayers go out to the guys and their families. I am glad to hear good news that they are doing better and expected to recover!

That's first class right there. That's awesome Jim

Canopies on high performance offshore boats are built to withstand the most common impact - a frontal stuff. And that's a pretty tough hit to take. They are simply not designed to take hits from other angles as of yet because of the difficulty in doing so.

In this case had the glass not blown out away from them, neither just might not be alive today do to the pressure inside the cockpit.
Notice the front hatches had blown open as well...

Thoughts and prayers to them both for a quick recovery....

They were just with us 2 weeks ago at the Buffalo Poker Run. At the convoy we do on the NYS Thruway (I90) they just happened to be at the rest stop, we met up at, fueling up. Gorgeous boat and regular, every day guys. They were telling us the boat was only 2 weeks old at that time! It hadn't been totally dialed in yet but they were expecting 180mph out of it. Carbon Fiber construction and I guess they were right on the speed. Supposedly they did 168 on Lake Erie during the run.
Thoughts and prayers are with them.

This crossed my mind too. Did they implode from impact or blow out from the side impact? Talk about violent! When the sponsoon hit the water it sounded like thunder. I cant even imagine the chaos in a cockpit in that environment. Just wild.

Luck to be alive is an understatement. The few things (very few) that went right saved their lives.

Prayers to the injured. God bless.

Having talked shop with Mike in the past, there is NO DOUBT in my mind, that he will be looking at ALL aspects of this accident for concideration into future designs/builds.

After seeing videos like this.......my desire to go fast on the water is waning. If talented drivers are getting into trouble then I certainly don't have the skill needed to run those speeds!

Correct me if I'm wrong here... But I was always under the impression that nobody had ever survived in a blowover/wreck at over 160mph before this......

Like I said before... No doubt OL has canopies dialed in. Two guys went for a wild ride and landed on the roof and both of them are breathing... It's unbelievable if you think about it.

I've seen several of the videos from different angles and no matter how many times you see it, it turns your stomach over a few times and makes the hair on your head stand straight up. When the sponsons hit the water the first time, you can see how violent that first impact really was and then they were in the air for a few seconds; no matter how experienced you are, that had to be absolutely terrifying. I just spoke to Mike last week; he's a great guy. We have been praying for him and Joel and their families...

It took long enough that I was facing the other way when it lifted and the people on the boat next to me started yelling about a flip and I turned back to look down course and saw it completely verticle in the air (after the sponon hit and it shot back up). It looked so surreal in person... I'm just so thankful that both guys will be OK.