The first time I stood on the Paignton seafront and watched something fast come in low over the bay, I understood something about why coastal shows have outlasted most of their inland rivals. There is a quality to an aircraft over open water that you cannot reproduce over a grass strip or a runway. The sea provides a backdrop that makes the aircraft look small and the sky look enormous, which is the right proportion for display flying.
The English Riviera Airshow turns ten this year, which sounds like a modest milestone until you consider how many shows have not made it to five. It has run every year since 2016 with no cancellations except those caused by external events entirely outside the organisers’ control. That record is not accidental and it is not simply luck.
The show is organised by Torbay Council in partnership with the local Business Improvement District. That arrangement means it answers to different pressures than a privately-run airshow, and those pressures are actually more stable. The economic case for the event is built into its structure: the reported five million pound boost to the local economy justifies the council’s involvement year after year. No gate revenue means no gate target to miss, which removes one of the most common ways airshows fail.
I want to say something that most anniversary coverage of this show will not say, which is that this model is not replicable everywhere. Torbay has a bay that puts aircraft over water, a seafront that holds a large crowd naturally, and a council that sees economic value in the event. Not every town has those conditions, and the success here does not prove that council-funded free-entry airshows work universally.
What changed my thinking about this show was a conversation at the 2024 edition with someone who works in event planning for a different coastal airshow. He pointed out that the English Riviera’s programme relies heavily on RAF display allocation, which is confirmed later than most shows need to finalise their marketing. The 2026 RAF display allocation was reportedly still pending confirmation during the planning phase, which is a structural uncertainty the promotional materials do not reflect.
There is a context behind the rise of coastal airshows that is rarely acknowledged in celebratory coverage. After Shoreham in 2015, displays over land attracted a level of CAA scrutiny that coastal and over-water events did not face to the same degree. That is not the only reason coastal shows have performed well, but it is part of the picture.
The Friday evening Take Off event, which returned in 2025 and continues in 2026, deserves attention as a format choice. A Spitfire flypast at dusk with pyrotechnics is not the same thing as an afternoon display programme. It is a spectacle designed for people who have come for the atmosphere rather than the aviation, and it works for exactly that reason. Whether that is good for airshow culture is a more complicated question than the attendance figures suggest.
Ten years of the English Riviera Airshow proves that a free coastal event with strong council backing and a good natural site can build a durable audience. It proves that the gate revenue model is not the only model, and that towns willing to absorb the cost as economic infrastructure can succeed. What it does not prove is that British airshow culture is healthy.
The same years that saw the English Riviera Airshow establish itself saw a significant number of other events quietly disappear. Some were victims of rising display fees, some of CAA regulatory changes, and some of economics that simply stopped adding up. The English Riviera Airshow’s success is real but it sits against a backdrop of contraction that the anniversary celebrations tend not to mention.
A decade at Torbay is a genuine achievement, and the show deserves the recognition it will receive this weekend. The honest lesson it offers is not that airshow culture is in good health. It can survive where the geography, the money, and the institutional will happen to align at the same time.
Alex Bradley is a UK-based aviation writer and airshow circuit regular who has spent years attending displays from RIAT at Fairford and the Biggin Hill Festival of Flight to small fly-ins that drew two hundred people and a hot dog van, and values both for entirely different reasons.
He is not a pilot. He is not a PR man for the aviation industry. He is the person in the crowd who has been coming long enough to notice when something has quietly changed, when an organiser is papering over a problem, and when a display is genuinely worth the drive.
His writing on Redhill Airshow covers the British airshow circuit, safety, display team politics, CAA regulations, and the quiet contraction of grass airfield culture that nobody in the industry wants to discuss plainly.
He has stood at Redhill Aerodrome in every kind of English summer weather, watched Tiger Moths bank low over Surrey farmland, and carries strong opinions about what this country is slowly losing one cancelled event at a time.
