The news from Mountain Home came through on a Saturday. I happened to be at Redhill at the time, watching a Strikemaster do a close low pass over the grass strip. The contrast between the two scenes was not comfortable to sit with.
Two United States Navy EA-18G Growlers collided during a training exercise near the base. The aircraft are valued at approximately sixty-eight million dollars each. A hundred and thirty-six million dollars of hardware was destroyed in a matter of seconds. In this instance, both pilots survived.
CNN published an analysis shortly after that asked a question military display culture is not accustomed to hearing plainly. Is any of this worth it? The piece referenced a 2012 Navy study that found a negative ninety-nine percent return on investment for the Blue Angels. That calculation measured recruiting benefits against an annual budget of approximately ninety-eight million dollars.
When broader goodwill factors like community economic benefit are included, the ratio narrows. It still remains negative at minus forty-one percent. The Pentagon declined to provide current budget figures to CNN, and a 2024 Congressional-mandated cost-benefit study has not been publicly released.
I want to be careful here because I am not an American taxpayer and this is not my argument to make alone. But the underlying question translates to the British context, and it deserves the same honest treatment. We do not publish detailed budget figures for the Red Arrows. When I have asked, the answers have been vague in ways that suggest the question is not welcome.
Redhill operates on a different scale from anything the CNN piece is discussing. A grass strip fly-in with two hundred people and a single hot dog van is not carrying a hundred-million-dollar annual budget. But the question the American coverage raises is not limited to American defence budgets. It is about what publicly funded spectacle is for and who it benefits.
The Red Arrows over Fairford on a clear July Saturday are among the most technically accomplished things you will see in British aviation. The synchronisation is genuine, the risk is real, and the flying represents years of dedicated training. None of that makes the financial question go away.
The historical record for military demonstration teams is not reassuring when examined honestly. The Thunderbirds lost four pilots in a single 1982 formation crash. A Blue Angels pilot died in Tennessee in 2016, and an Air Force major was killed at a civilian airshow in 2018. Each accident is investigated, procedures are revised, and the season continues.
What changed how I think about this was an overheard conversation at Biggin Hill some years ago. A man who had clearly done this professionally was explaining to someone beside him that the display sequence is precisely calibrated. He said it was calibrated not just for safety but for the specific emotional response it produces in a crowd. That is a different description of the activity than the one in any programme notes I have read.
Military display teams exist to produce an emotional effect in a civilian audience on behalf of a defence institution. That is their purpose, and the flying is the mechanism. When you understand it that way, the ninety-eight million dollar budget looks less like a display cost and more like a communications budget. The distinction matters when you are deciding whether the expenditure is justified.
The avgas smell on a warm morning and the chest-tightening sound of a fast jet at low level are real experiences. The flying is real. The skill involved is not in question. But the organisations that run these teams are not primarily in the entertainment business, and the question of value should be answered on those terms.
The Mountain Home collision killed nobody, which is the outcome that matters most. The CNN analysis will be read, debated, and quietly set aside by the institutions it concerns. The cost-benefit study Congress requested in 2024 has not been released, which is itself an answer of a kind.
There is no version of this conversation that the military display establishment wants to have in public. That is not a reason to stop having it.
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.
