In an interview with a cable news station on Monday, National Transportation Safety Board member Mark Rosekind said investigators were analyzing the "tremendous amounts of material" collected at the scene and submitted by spectators who photographed and videotaped the crash.

Continue reading

A key focus of the investigation is the tail of the high performance aircraft, which some photos seem to show lost a part before the crash.

"There are a lot of photos of specific aspects of the tail," Rosekind said. "We have found in the wreckage some parts of tail from the accident aircraft. We have those photos."

Michael Houghton, president and CEO of the Reno Air Races, said it took 62 minutes to get all of the injured on their way to hospitals, a pace of about one each minute.

"They kind of came in waves," said Morkin, the Renown hospital ER director. "You're just running from one patient to the next.” Some lost limbs, others had severe facial wounds. There were many patients with broken bones or lacerations.

Yet it could have been far worse, officials said as the NTSB investigated what went wrong.

The plane crashed at the edge of the crowd, narrowly missing the grandstand where thousands more people were watching. Spectators were sprayed with aviation fuel, but the plane did not explode, and its fuel did not catch fire.

Ken Liano, a structural engineer and aircraft consultant, was surprised the plane didn't explode into a fireball, as was the case in a fiery accident a day later at a West Virginia air show that killed the pilot but did not harm spectators.

"I guess God was on the people's side," Liano said.