Dear Friends, I often tell my student pilots that it is wise to hold on before taking off when another aircraft has just taken off. Even two minutes is not enough sometimes because the wake turbulence may move in an unpredictable way – rather sideways – depending on the wind but not only. You can watch a previous post in which a spectacular uncontrolled roll happened: https://airforces.fr/2016/03/06/must-see-weird-takeoff-explained/ I have repeated that over and over – waiting is as wise as safe:
We cannot see clearly what really made the seaplane – assumed to be a French Canadair CL-415 Superscooper water bomber – veer off but it was definitely too close to the previous aircraft. Maybe the pilot wanted to do the right thing by saving time to save more lives. Was it because of the bow wake of the flying boat? Because of the air wake turbulence? A human error? A control failure? Or a combination of several factors? Anyway when you see an aircraft of this size taking off, please wait for two minutes before entering the same path. Fortunately, a pole was clipped, the Canadair was damaged, but it could have been worse.
