Browsing: Airshow Safety & Incidents

There is a particular quality to the silence that follows something that should not have happened. Not the absence of noise. Something denser than that. I

It was the Tuesday after Shoreham. I remember standing in the car park at Redhill, just watching a Cherokee do circuits in the afternoon quiet, and thinkin

I heard the F-22 before I had any reasonable right to. The sound arrived somewhere over the tree line to the west of the display line, a low registered pre

There was a moment at Fairford, three summers ago, when the crowd went quiet in a way I had not heard before. Not the reverent hush that falls when a Lanca

I saw it for the first time on a phone screen, held by a man in a folding chair at a small fly-in somewhere in Oxfordshire. He was showing it to his compan

The ejection seat came out at about two thousand feet. I know that because I had been watching the display closely enough to judge the altitude, which is s

The Show Must Go On. Until It Shouldn’t. I was standing on the south side of the Redhill strip on a Tuesday evening in July, watching a Harvard come in low

There is a section of the flight line at most British airshows that I have come to think of, privately, as the grief line. It is not marked. Nobody acknowl

The ejection handle on a Martin-Baker seat is painted in diagonal yellow and black stripes for exactly the reason you would assume: because when you need i

It was Fairford, the year they had the full Carrier Air Wing package on the static line, and I remember standing close enough to an EA-18G Growler to read