Hawker Hunter crash at Airshow.

Personally I enjoy seeing vintage aircraft at close range and doing a flypast of the crowd line (fast and slow) rather than aerobatics as I can take better photos and appreciate seeing the aircraft in operation, without the pilot or the public being at too great a risk. I don't ever want display pilots to put themselves at risk for my enjoyment.

"doing a flypast", anyone recall the famous German Navy pair of F014s? They were just flypasts and boy were they good! As for the likes of Waado and Fairford, nothing to do with the CAA.

Personally I enjoy seeing vintage aircraft at close range and doing a flypast of the crowd line (fast and slow) rather than aerobatics

I agree...

I must admit I do like a good low and fast fly past, I always liked the Phantom on a low and fast fly past as at a Mildenhall air show in the late ninties or a Jaguar both sounded really good might have been something to do with the way the engines were positioned both planes being similar from the rear.

Theres a letter in todays Telegraph pointing out that this isnt the first crash involving spectator fatalities since Farnborough. The writer remembers the Vulcan crash at Syerston. Okay the 3 people killed on the ground cant trully said to be spectators as they were working, but they werent aircrew.

Following the 1952 Farnborough DH110 break up during the show they continued with Neville Duke breaking the sound barrier in a Hunter fly past ~ more impressive than wing overs and I recall that there was an element of risk in attending an air shows at the time which every one had accepted.

My Father took me to some of the Farnborough airshows between 1955 to 1959 and spent most of his time asleep on the grass until on one occasion a Vulcan completed a simulated full tactical take off procedure ( ? ) and woke him up in a highly confused state due to the ground vibrating ~ when he finally got to his feet he could not see due to picking up the lady who had been standing behind him ~ who was now sitting on top of his cloth cap still firmly attached to his head while not fully appreciating why she was no longer standing at ground level.

A very similar procedure was being practiced in 1978 just a little further north from our offices and workshops in Northbrook Chicago.

Unfortunately they were reported to have suffered a flame out ( ? ) and the aircrew were killed when the Vulcan came down in the local dump. ( XL390 from 617 Sqd. )

The following year we also lost a significant number of our field engineers when a DC10 lost an engine during take off from Chicago ( AA Flight 191 )

The challenge with any incident is that the news readers never just keep to the facts but always have to add the uninformed opinion of their news desk managers.

Quite right about Neville Duke taking to the air after the DH 110 crash at Farnborough, it was how we all behaved then , bravery was the order of the day as most spectators had lived through a war even if only as children like me. I also think that the first thing the commentator said as the plane began to break up was 'oh my God' but I've never seen this reported anywhere since.

I think it was after that disaster that the aircraft were no longer allowed to fly in towards the crowd which is what John Derry was doing when he crashed. This is why so many just behind us on the hill were killed as the engine kept coming towards us, I shall never forget it.

I heard a similar account on Radio Oxford from a Young lady (Then) talking about her near-by experience with this disaster at Farnborough. Would that have been you Pauline ?

Reports tonight that the Teesside Airshow set for this Saturday has been cancelled ;
www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news...ed-following-9936292

airfields wrote:

I heard a similar account on Radio Oxford from a Young lady (Then) talking about her near-by experience with this disaster at Farnborough. Would that have been you Pauline ?

No Paul (hope I've got that right?) somehow I wouldn't want to talk about what happened to me on radio although, as you can tell from this, I will talk to friends. The memories of the break up of the aircraft are still so vivid to me and the engine passed so close to my father, his friend who had been a wireless operator on a Lancaster during the war, and me, that we could almost have reached up and touched it. It is impossible to forget something like that, and seeing the film of the smoking engine on the ground afterwards, as I have recently, gives me feelings that are impossible to describe, sheer horror that all those people died so close to me, when moments before we had been thrilled by what we had been watching and listening to. And how brave Neville Duke was, as what he did certainly helped in the aftermath and made people try to carry on as normally as possible, everyone just kept out of the way of those helping the injured, no-one then would have been taking 'selfies' of themselves at the scene!