Clarifying, I am not a friend of Jimmy's, although I would have been proud to be one - never got to meet him personally, only watched from far away through his exploits and outreach/philanthropy.

The tone in the abstract, to me, was rather accusatory with respect to the mods GG had undergone, I only wanted to point out that many of the biggest mods were completed prior to her purchase by Jimmy. Also, conventional approaches to testing that are applicable in the certified world (I am a Reliability/Safety/Maintainability Engineering Manager in aerospace) are not really possible for these extremely modified raceplanes, they are literally flying as fast as they can go.

I also object to the wording that a line was crossed with respect to the safety of spectators - the tickets as I understand it have had a waiver for years that explains the race is potentially dangerous, how anyone could go to an event like this, observe such power, speed and inertia at such close range and NOT know in their hearts there is some potential risk is simply beyond me.

Once you think for a moment about the kinetic energy of a 6-7,000lb raceplane, travelling at 500 mph, having a full six degree of freedom, you begin to appreciate that the current course and race pilot training to turn into the course if experiencing trouble, is not just the best way, it is the only way to minimize the potential for injury to spectators - but in an event like what happened to GG, it is purely probabalistic, the plane can travel almost no distance, to great distance, in any direction - most of the time the only loss would be the pilot and/or the plane.

While gut wrenchingly tragic for those who were killed or injured and of course their family and friends (I had 2 friends there who were close enough to have been killed), the accident was the statistical abberation everyone feared, and which has, in almost 60 years now, only happened once.

I for one am proud of how the community reacted in reaching out to help survivors and the familes of those lost, and I am also satisfied that the reaction was not too bad, just wish the abstract wasn't written the way it was.