"Go Aggies" - Comments

D. W. (Texas Aggie Class of 1991) writes:  “The picture in question is the 4 F-16s flying over Kyle Field in a missing man type formation titled ‘Go Aggies’.

This picture unfortunately is not real and has been photo-shopped.”

“All flyovers before the game occur from the south end-zone to the north end-zone.  The south end-zone is the bottom of the picture.  While a missing-man formation was flown over Kyle Field in 1999 to honor the 12 Aggies who died in the bonfire collapse, it was done the normal route from the south end-zone to the north end-zone.”

"D" writes:  "I immediately noticed the 'Aggie missing man formation' photo was fake, but for a more obvious reason - the shadows on the stadium show the sun to be on the left, but the shadows on the airplane tail show the sun was on their right (as oriented in the picture), the mismatch clearly proving it a fake.  If the person had pointed either sub-picture the other way, so that the shadows had matched, they would also have appeared to come from the other end of the stadium, negating the other criticism."

R. K. writes: "Though I can't say with authority, I think it's against policy for public relations fly-overs of U.S. military warplanes to occur with aircraft carrying weapons.  These F-16's appear to be armed with wingtip mounted AIM-9 Sidewinder or AIM-7 Sparrow AAM's (air to air missiles)."

J. V. writes: There is one more reason that the missing man photo is an obvious fake.  I realized it on first glance without even seeing the issue with the conflicting shadows (also a dead give away) or the wrong direction of flight.

Having flown in such a fly-by I can tell you that when the # 3 man pulls up for the missing man, he ends up above and behind the other three members of the flight, not above and ahead.  He'd have to instantly accelerate to about Mach 3 and pull 50+ Gs to have the photo turn out as shown in this image.  The only other way is for him to have been that far ahead of the rest of the flight when he pulled up.  Another problem is that all missing man fly-bys I've ever seen, the number 3 man was the one who pulled up.

Before the pull-up the formation should look like this from above:

            V4
V2    V3
    V1

A correct pull-up would leave the formation looking like this:

        V3 <------ (this is the missing man- falling behind rest of flight as he climbs and they continue forward)


            V4
V2
    V1

This is what the image shows:

V2       V4  (out of position - he should be aft of V2's position)
    V1



        V3 (missing man - or "Photoshopped" man! )

Another thing I didn't catch at first was that the remaining "wingmen" are about 1/2 to 2/3 the size of the leading plane.  They should all be the same size if they are (supposed to be) no more than 3 to 30 feet apart.  It's obvious that the person doing the photoshopping knew what he was doing with Photoshop, but very little about the dynamics and geometry of the flyby.  A simple technical drawing course (and common sense) would have alerted him to the wrong size issue.

D. B. (Capt. AA & Retired US Naval Aviator) writes: "... one other 'glaring' error made by the photoshopper of this doctored image is staring you right in the face, so to speak ... it's the reflection the sun makes on the 'missing man' pilot's visor ... the reflection clearly shows that the sun is shining from over his right shoulder about the 5 o'clock position ... can't possibly match the shadows on the stadium and the other F-16's ..."