Browsing: Airshow Safety & Incidents

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

There is a particular quality of silence that follows something going wrong in the air. I’ve experienced it twice at displays — once at a small grass strip

I was standing at Fairford in 2003 when a B-1B Lancer came through on a pass so low you could feel the pressure change in your chest before the sound arriv

What the Crowd Carries Home I was at a grass strip event in Hertfordshire when I first heard someone describe watching an aircraft go in. Not a collision.

There is a particular position that experienced airshow photographers take up at the rope line that I have come to recognise over the years, a kind of sett

The Merlin was already on finals when I checked my phone, and I remember thinking afterwards that it was an odd moment to be reading about dead men. The ai

My mother used to drop my father at the airfield and drive away. Not in distress, not with any visible drama. She would pull up to the gate, he would get o

The first time I saw an ejection seat demonstration — not a live one, mercifully, just a ground-based pyrotechnic test at a trade day at Farnborough — I re