I have not seen anything posted here regarding this, but was curious if anyone has any more info on it? Here is a local news story I read last night, but as you will see it doesn't tell much.

Vampire down

A litte more info here






that's never good.

Pete Zacaggino was at the controls.  The incident began with partial loss of the canopy.  He pulled up to 11,000 MSL and found that the engine would not make power and he would be unable to make any of the runways.  Considering best glide of a clean Vampire is around 160 KTS he did a heck of a job.  Word is that while the aircraft is a total loss, it will become a parts donor for another Vampire that is under restoration.



Photo of the Vampire's remains can be found here: http://www.nvracingnews.com/2016/09/17/air-race-update-saturday-sept-17/



 
 

Sucks.  

They are neat aircraft.

There are interesting airplanes.  The aircraft had a wooden cockpit, everything else was metal.  It had mechanical flight controls, hydraulic flaps, and pneumatic brakes.  

When I was in A&P school in the early 1970s we had a single place Vampire that we used for engine runs, after we got it to run that is.  We were in the first class at that school so we got to do a lot of firsts.  The Gobblin motor had a clockwork mechanism to control fuel and ignition for starting but this one was shot and we couldn't find a replacement.  Being inventive college students we took the ignition system from a J57 and used it while manually turning the igniters and fuel on.  The first engine run was fun in that we turned the fuel on too soon and had a hot start.  Our instructor energetically wanted us to shut it down but the student in the cockpit was a former USAF F-4 engineman who ignored him and went to 80% power blowing out great balls of flaming fuel out the tail pipe. If we had listened to the instructor the Vampire would have been damaged by the hot start.  It took us a few runs to work out the proper sequence for starting but after we did that the Gobblin engine ran well.  The college closed their A&P program after about 10 years and the Vampire was sold to someone in Canada.