reporter: the pilot was 74. veteran stuntman jimmy leeward posted this video on youtube in june. the systems aren t proven yet. we think they re going to be okay. reporter: one possible problem, mechanical failure. in some photos a thin sliver of the tail, crucial for maintaining balance, appears to be missing. another, that the pilot blacked out. federal investigators are also looking at the broader question. how safe was this race to begin with? the pilots of these experimental planes take their lives in their hands. did the spectators know they were doing so too? pilot john parker is the same age as jimmy leeward and every bit as seasoned. the jimmy leeward incident was a tragic accident, but that s all it was, was a tragic accident. and should the incident have happened ten seconds sooner or ten seconds later, you wouldn t be here. reporter: the reno air race was already the last of its kind. many here expect that friday may
of the tail which helps control thw aircraft s pitch. and that s only part of the investigation as abc s david wright reports from reno. reporter: think of souped up antique cars flying at 500 miles an hour. high speed, low altitude and no protective barrier for the crowd. that s what made the reno air race so thrilling. until 4:20 friday afternoon. this is like a track in the sky without having those protective fences around the spectator stands. reporter: these are 70-year-old world war ii fighter planes modified to turn them into drag racers. the airplane looks quite a bit different. we cut ten feet off the wings. five feet off each side. reporter: in a promotional video, jimmy leeward, the pilot who crashed, described the extensive modifications that made this old propeller plane race as fast as a jet. you need those type of speeds. you need jet speeds. any time you modify an
about this for years and under the president s plan anyone making more than $1 million a year would paper the same percentage of taxes at the middle class. boy, it does not sit well with republicans. when you pick one area of the economy and say we re going to tax those people, because most people are not those people, that s class warfare. warren buffett has been honest and others i know who have haven t fortunate in life and wealthy say, for goodness sake, raise my taxes if that s going to help this economy move forward. brianna keilar is on the phone in washington with more details of the president s plan. depending on your perspective it s class warfare or sharing the burden. reporter: that s right. you re going to hear a lot more of that playing out today after the president unveils his plan in the rose garden at 10:30 a.m. let s look overall as what it is. it would save, according to the white house, $3 trillion over ten years bp twice what this super committee
the rest of the unit joins in, shooting wildly. they come under fire. [ gun fire ] an ambulance is hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. they and we are caught in the open. a pot shot. something in the distance. fightered opened up and there was some return fire. cnn producer was hit. i ve been shot. down, down. down. go, go, go! get down! right side. go to the right side of everything. go, go! that s it. good. other way. we start to check his injury. looks like there is a piece of shrapnel inside. you can feel it? i could feel it. when he was moving around, i could feel it inside. reporter: at a nearby field hospital, medics help ian. while dealing with their own grief. a colleague of these men was killed in the same attack just meters away from where the rpg, we think, hit the ambulance that was near us. what was his name? and how old was he? about 27, 28. reporter: tell me about him. about 9:00 he wake up me in my bed and we he came to tus and he s like
aircraft, that p-51. this is what ntsb officials had to say just a little while ago. take a look. for new information, first of all, there had been reports about a mayday from the pilot. thus far, our investigators have found no information of a mayday call from the pilot. next, the investigators have found that the accident aircraft was equipped with a video camera, facing outward. they have also found camera fragments at the wreckage site. and among the wreckage site, they have found multiple memory cards that could have come from the camera. reporter: so, don, that s what we know at this point. all of that information is going to be shipped off to the ntsb lab in washington. we should tell you that this would have been the very last day for these races. normally, there would be thousands of people out here. of course, a huge economic loss for reno, the fact that they had to cancel the weekend, the economic loss is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars. they, o