LONDON (AP) — A military jet taking part in a British airshow crashed into a busy main road, killing seven people and injuring more than a dozen others, police said Saturday.
The Hawker Hunter fighter jet, which was participating in the Shoreham Airshow near Brighton in southern England, hit several vehicles on the road as it crashed Saturday afternoon. Witnesses told local TV that the jet appeared to have crashed when it failed to pull out of a loop maneuver.
West Sussex Police said seven died and one patient with life-threatening injuries was taken to the hospital. A further 14 people were treated for minor injuries.
A witness, Stephen Jones, told the BBC that the pilot had just begun his display.
“He’d gone up into a loop and as he was coming out of the loop I just thought, you’re too low, you’re too low, pull up. And he flew straight into the ground either on or very close to the A27, which runs past the airport,” Jones said.
The force said all the casualties were believed to have occurred on the road, and no one on the airfield was believed injured.
News reports carried video and photographs of a fireball erupting near trees and huge plumes of thick black smoke rising.
The road was closed in both directions Saturday.
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Maybe the actual statistics for injuries/deaths at airshows aren’t that bad, but we just had a fatality in our Chicago Air & Water Show this month (two parachutists crashed into each other and one hit a building). Could it be time to reconsider these activities?
I don’t know about reconsidering the whole thing, but’s it certainly a great question as to why this air show was taking place directly over a busy highway.
The airshow wasn’t taking place over the highway, that’s just where the jet went when the pilot screwed up his maneuver. And he did screw it up…he didn’t have the right amount of speed or altitude to do what he was trying to do. It’s such a common error to do the loop wrong and misjudge the pullout that you see that particular type of crash all the time…they really should stop allowing loops with low pullouts at airshows.
Oops… again?