Plane crashes onto A27 at Shoreham Air Show

[Spymaster]

Death toll expected to reach 20 apparently. There must be people who were in the area still missing.

 

[existentialist]

BTW, as a sentient human being and forum member i'm qualified to remark on this matter. And i also know that there are those here who can apprise me of current regulations as and when necessary. Please don't hesitate to be helpful in this matter.

All I would say is "Let's wait".

Let's find out what actually happened, and let us trust (as sceptically as we might need to be in order to make that a valid trust) those in possession of the facts and relevant experience to inform us, honestly and in full, what the causes of this accident were, before we start solidifying our thinking about the best way to resolve it. Because there will be all kinds of changes that could be made (eg, I know looping the loop looks impressive, but it does seem to me to be a manoeuvre fraught with potential for all kinds of unintended outcomes, so one answer might be to further restrict the types of manoeuvre that can be performed, but someone far more well versed in the technology and physics of it might disagree with that, too), and even if these displays took place over the sea, aircraft would need to take off and land from strips on land, which poses its own risks - so coming to quick conclusions, even if they seem obvious, might still not yield the safest or most acceptable answers.

It might even be that the safest and most acceptable answer is simply not to conduct aerobatic manoeuvres as part of airshows. But we need to know why that should be before assuming it's the best answer.

 

[redcogs]

Where is this "health and safety gone mad" brigade's opposition here? All I am seeing - and, hopefully, posting - are reasonable arguments against simply responding to a catastrophe by trying to ban something, when we don't actually know what was responsible for the catastrophe yet.

History is too littered with knee-jerk responses to events that turned out not only to fail to achieve what they intended, but have often created other problems in the process to really think that's a sensible way to go about responding to a disaster like this.

i've at no point argued for a ban, in fact earlier in the thread i explicitly ruled one out.

 

[existentialist]

i've at no point argued for a ban, in fact earlier in the thread i explicitly ruled one out.

Just to be clear, I wasn't singling you out! But I don't see this "H&SGM" thing going on here, either.

 

[brogdale]

For the sake of complete transparency I ought to declare that I was once a keen observer of airshows and enjoyed taking my lad to Biggin Hill. That changed in 2001 when we witnessed, at fairly close range, the fatal crash of a Kingcobra. I/we haven't been to a show since.

 

[redcogs]

All I would say is "Let's wait".

Let's find out what actually happened, and let us trust (as sceptically as we might need to be in order to make that a valid trust) those in possession of the facts and relevant experience to inform us, honestly and in full, what the causes of this accident were, before we start solidifying our thinking about the best way to resolve it. Because there will be all kinds of changes that could be made (eg, I know looping the loop looks impressive, but it does seem to me to be a manoeuvre fraught with potential for all kinds of unintended outcomes, so one answer might be to further restrict the types of manoeuvre that can be performed, but someone far more well versed in the technology and physics of it might disagree with that, too), and even if these displays took place over the sea, aircraft would need to take off and land from strips on land, which poses its own risks - so coming to quick conclusions, even if they seem obvious, might still not yield the safest or most acceptable answers.

It might even be that the safest and most acceptable answer is simply not to conduct aerobatic manoeuvres as part of airshows. But we need to know why that should be before assuming it's the best answer.

i can see no objection to allowing appropriate investigation to arrive at necessary fact based conclusions. But we don't really need to wait for a concluded argument (presented by experts) before voicing opinion upon matters which remain pressing and urgent. Air displays continue, i don't know, but some may already be scheduled to take place in areas of population. It is legitimate and sensible to raise concerns immediately in such circumstances.

 

[mauvais]

What i have deduced from the tragedy at Shoreham is that many members of the public have died as a consequence of an accident. Some of those people were probably disinterested in the air display, and were simply going about their daily activities. Had this display taken place at a venue overlooking the sea, then there could still have been a tragedy, and a pilot may have died, but the scale of the incident would probably have been greatly reduced. i'm not aware that there is existing legislation that has been infringed by this catastrophe, i doubt that such infringements could have occurred without experts in the field (yourself?) revealing that law breaking contributed. So, it is reasonably safe to conclude that existing legislation could be enhanced to include the demand for future air displays to be organised only over areas of open sea (or possibly large areas of unpopulated moorland?).

Such a reform wouldn't even involve too much inconvenience would it? Banning is out of the question for me (i agree with existentialist's main thrust above), but reform with public safety in mind seems essential.

BTW, as a sentient human being and forum member i'm qualified to remark on this matter. And i also know that there are those here who can apprise me of current regulations as and when necessary. Please don't hesitate to be helpful in this matter.

You have one accident across fifty years and thousands of displays to extrapolate from, which is never going to be a strong basis for implementing a pattern, but on the other hand may well reveal that current provisions are insufficient. You can call me a technocrat but my view is that that judgement ought to be made by experts that understand the technical risk and probabilities, influenced by a non-technical input from public society, which deserves a say in what the acceptable balance of risk is taken to be, but not how to achieve it. This is just as how we ought to solicit opinion on whether we have nuclear power stations, but not crowdsource how to actually operate any that we end up with.

You and many others come at this from a layman perspective with opinions like 'over the sea is better', and that an accident must mean change is required. Both may transpire to be true but are not necessarily so. Aviation is dangerous, to differing extents based on the nature of the activity, and you cannot completely eliminate risk. You can manage and mitigate it. To say that e.g. a seaside or remote moorland setting is safer requires some expertise in domains like aviation, event, public safety and emergency response planning that I suspect neither of us possess. With a legislative reform, you may well fix the particular circumstance at Shoreham - which again I remind you that we still don't understand - but unfortunately this has already irreversibly happened, so is not a valuable subject of prospective legislation, which is instead the general set of future air display events anywhere in the UK.

And for clarity, although I have some background in and understanding of aviation, I am not in any sense an expert.

 

[sim667]

I'm a bit confused as to why air shows in places like this aren't held overlooking the sea, surely thats an easy way to really minimise fatalities if something should go awry. Especially if they're going to fly planes which are now getting toward 70 years old, and highly explosive on impact, I'm sure anyone who's owned a classic car will say that no matter how much maintenance you do, things will still go wrong, and the same must be true of planes, not to mention the pilots who are capable of flying aircraft of that age are probably aging themselves now.

Anyway, its a very sad accident, and thoughts to everyone involved...... I've got a lot of friends in Shoreham, but have heard back that they're all ok.

 

[brogdale]

I'm a bit confused as to why air shows in places like this aren't held overlooking the sea, surely thats an easy way to really minimise fatalities if something should go awry. Especially if they're going to fly planes which are now getting toward 70 years old, and highly explosive on impact, I'm sure anyone who's owned a classic car will say that no matter how much maintenance you do, things will still go wrong, and the same must be true of planes, not to mention the pilots who are capable of flying aircraft of that age are probably aging themselves now.

Anyway, its a very sad accident, and thoughts to everyone involved...... I've got a lot of friends in Shoreham, but have heard back that they're all ok.

Telegraph reporting the reassurances from organisers at this coming weekend's Clacton show...

11.10 - The shows will go on
Despite the Shoreham flying disaster, organisers of other air displays this summer are determined that the shows will go on.

Next on the calendar is the hugely-popular display on the seafront at Clacton, Essex, on Thursday and Friday and bosses moved swiftly today to reassure visitors they would be safe.

Tendring District Council which runs the show - an annual event that has taken place for the last 23 years - has been in contact with its flight consultants following the tragic crash of the Hawker Hunter at Shoreham.

Council spokesman Nigel Brown said: "We are in ongoing discussions throughout the day with the organisers .

"At this point nothing has changed as far as Clacton is concerned but any guidance put out by the Civil Aviation Authority following the incident at Shoreham will obviously be taken on board."

The Hawker Hunter that crashed was not due to appear at Clacton but an expected crowd of more than 200,000 will, see the last Vulcan V-bomber on one of its last-ever flights, the Sally B B-17 Flying Fortress, a Spitfire and the RAF's Red Arrows display team

Mr Brown added: "While this terrible crash does not directly affect us, our thoughts very much go out to the family and friends of anyone who died, was injured or affected by the incident.

"Those running and organising airshows are a very tight knit community and most people know each other and we can only start to imagine what they have gone through this past day or so.

"But our show is a different type of show as the majority of the flying takes place over the sea rather than land.

"But there will be no complacency and those people directly involved in the flying displays will be going through all the normal checks and procedures that take place before any event of this kind.

"We work extremely closely with all the emergency services throughout the year and during the event to ensure that robust safety measures are in place. Safety is and always will be our primary concern."

 

[Dan U]

Fwiw my father in law is a very experienced ATC, he hates airshows and has refused to work them as he thinks they are too risky.

He also thinks we are mad where we have some of them in the UK, a view we discussed before this event so it's not a hindsight job sadly.

 

[sim667]

Realistically its something you can worry about if you're planning on going to an airshow, but accidents are few and far between..... this one is a particularly nasty one.

But it does need considering that people want to see historical planes, and as aviation has been around for a relatively short amount of time, we haven't really learnt to deal with such old planes and their safety issues..... maybe thats something that needs more consideration.

 

[existentialist]

Realistically its something you can worry about if you're planning on going to an airshow, but accidents are few and far between..... this one is a particularly nasty one.

But it does need considering that people want to see historical planes, and as aviation has been around for a relatively short amount of time, we haven't really learnt to deal with such old planes and their safety issues..... maybe thats something that needs more consideration.

I think it gets a lot of consideration - isn't one of the reasons that XH558, the Vulcan, is retiring because its airframe has now reached the limit of its safe life? But yes, nothing should ever be beyond examination, and if we learn things from this crash that result in changes to policies and procedures, then maybe the tragedy will not have been totally in vain.

 

[weltweit]

The authorities will learn from this and improve safety as they have in the past.

I know from motor racing that when I started visiting races safety was very poor (I am thinking primarily about the Le Mans 24hr where 20 years ago I stood a couple of metres away from racecars doing 250mph) and disaster was only averted by luck, over the years safety has increased a great deal and spectator safety arrangements are now completely different and much more robust than they were 20 years ago.

It was interesting to read that the Red Arrows would not do a full display at Shoreham citing the local environment. I wonder if that and this accident might mean Shoreham's public liability insurance next year might be prohibitively expensive.

 

[gosub]

I think it gets a lot of consideration - isn't one of the reasons that XH558, the Vulcan, is retiring because its airframe has now reached the limit of its safe life? But yes, nothing should ever be beyond examination, and if we learn things from this crash that result in changes to policies and procedures, then maybe the tragedy will not have been totally in vain.

no, vulcan is retiring coz they can't get any more rubber seals for the engines

 

[LDC]

Got a mate on Facebook claiming the pilot should be held personally responsible for being reckless.

Your mate sounds like an arsehole to be honest. And an ignorant and arrogant one too.

 

[Orang Utan]

Your mate sounds like an arsehole to be honest. And an ignorant and arrogant one too.

Not really. He just has a different view.

 

[brogdale]

Not really. He just has a different view.

I would imagine that his basic point about litigation will not be far wrong. I believe the organisers were the RAFA?

 

[gosub]

Not really. He just has a different view.

Yes really, reaching that conclusion before the AAIB have started looking at it. could well have been an engine failure - how would that be the pilots personal responsibility?

 

[LDC]

Not really. He just has a different view.

A view that blames someone before anyone knows what actually happened. And a view that's not actually informed by fact and so not really valid as listening to. It'd be the same as me saying it's the fault of the bloke that did the maintenance on the plane the day before. And to be honest a pretty nasty view as it might be possible the pilot had some medical issue that caused the crash, or that he did everything he could have at risk to himself to mitigate the damage.

 

[existentialist]

The authorities will learn from this and improve safety as they have in the past.

I know from motor racing that when I started visiting races safety was very poor (I am thinking primarily about the Le Mans 24hr where 20 years ago I stood a couple of metres away from racecars doing 250mph) and disaster was only averted by luck, over the years safety has increased a great deal and spectator safety arrangements are now completely different and much more robust than they were 20 years ago.

Yes, it was partly luck, but we do have to remember that we are operating down at the far end of the odds spectrum in any case.

One of the big problems with how we respond to this kind of event is risk perception - something we're just not very good at doing intuitively. We tend not to be able to see any distinction between a one in a hundred chance and a one in a million one - if it doesn't happen, it's safe, and if it does happen, it becomes a certainty. And that perception is further distorted by the severity of the outcome - hence people immediately calling for air show displays to be severely curtailed, banned, or drastically changed, because that tiny chance of something going wrong has "become" a certainty with a horrific outcome.

It's the same thinking error which leads us to go to ever-more-strenuous efforts to prevent train and (civil) plane crashes, when the risk is already very low compared to, say, car travel, but resist efforts to limit the risks of cars. Not that this means we should just throw our hands in the air and not do anything about anything, but we need to bear in mind, as we try to eliminate risks of dramatic tragedies, that we may well be neglecting all kinds of far less dramatic, but far more likely accidents occurring along the way.

In practice, it makes sense to continue to work to improve safety, for example in the situation you give. But we have to remember, as we do that, that we're probably only reducing the risk from (plucks random figure from air) 1/100,000 to 1/500,000: in the grand scheme of things, it probably only cuts the number of deaths and serious injuries by a small amount. And, of course, we then don't see what those changes have averted - because nobody ever sees a headline that says "CAR FAILS TO CRASH INTO CROWD - 23 LIVES SAVED".

It was interesting to read that the Red Arrows would not do a full display at Shoreham citing the local environment. I wonder if that and this accident might mean Shoreham's public liability insurance next year might be prohibitively expensive.

This appears to be a myth that is gaining currency. The Red Arrows (and, I imagine, any display flying team) assess very carefully the environment they're being invited to perform in, and I believe that their decision not to participate was because the specific environment at Shoreham was not appropriate for a large (9 aircraft?) display team to operate. That would figure, given that Red Arrows displays tend to take place over a considerable area, rather than along a largely linear one, and I imagine they decided that the area available to them to do a display at Shoreham was not sufficient - nothing to do with any inherent safety issues at the airfield itself.

As for the public liability insurance - that takes us back to the risk perception thing. Insurers are experts in, if nothing else, risk. It is likely that they would have factored in all of the risk elements in this airshow to start with, and - depending on the outcome of any enquiry - it is quite possible that they will deem their initial assessment of the risk to have been perfectly accurate, and therefore not warranting of a change. Such insurance is usually aimed very much at covering very small risks of very severe things happening, and they are unlikely to be (professionally) fazed by a disaster like this. They may well, of course, put other restrictions on - if, for example, it appears that engine failure was a factor (I thought I saw what looked like a very brief "flameout" in the footage of the plane doing its loop, though I am completely ignorant of the workings of these things and it could be irrelevant), they'd refuse to cover demonstrations with single-engined aircraft, or something like that.

Of course, with insurers generally being quite opportunistic bastards, they might just decide they want to change the terms, anyway. I expect someone like kabbes could tell us a bit more about how such risks are assessed and analysed...

 

[Orang Utan]

A view that blames someone before anyone knows what actually happened. And a view that's not actually informed by fact and so not really valid as listening to. It'd be the same as me saying it's the fault of the bloke that did the maintenance on the plane the day before. And to be honest a pretty nasty view as it might be possible the pilot had some medical issue that caused the crash, or that he did everything he could have at risk to himself to mitigate the damage.

His view is that the pilot is at fault for being the pilot in the first place I think. I agree to some extent, though I wouldn't want to publicly malign an individual cog in a sinister machine.
He lives nearby, so I can make concessions for his misplaced anger.

 

[existentialist]

His view is that the pilot is at fault for being the pilot in the first place I think. I agree to some extent, though I wouldn't want to publicly malign an individual cog in a sinister machine.
He lives nearby, so I can make concessions for his misplaced anger.

I think the problem is the all-too-human desire to find someone or something specific to blame, rather than the rather more intellectualised and abstract activity of carefully trying to explain what happened. It's a natural tendency we have, particularly if something very emotive is involved, but it's not often terribly helpful in preventing the same thing from happening again.

 

[1927]

He will have had his flying suit on though won't he? So some protection from fire. Belted into a flying seat gives a lot of protection and then able to get out.

Unlike the people sat in their cars who got (from looking at the footage) consumed by a massive ball of fire with no notice at all.

Flying suit doesn't exactly give any protection from slamming in to the ground from a great height tho does it?

 

[Orang Utan]

Flying suit doesn't exactly give any protection from slamming in to the ground from a great height tho does it?

He wasn't slamming vertically from a great height. Look at the pics and you'll see the cockpit remains intact.

 

[1927]

It should never have been allowed in the first place. You've got the cast of The Last of the Summer Wine maintaining and operating a 55 year old nuclear bomber. A massively complex platform that the RAF struggled with in an era when the RAF was actually good at that sort of thing.

If you really believe that XH588 is being maintained by a load of old men akin to a railway preservation society you are misguided.

As for banning it and calling it folly have you seen how many people turn up to see her fly everywhere she goes? It is a plane that is loved in the same way Concorde was and its a great shame that she won't fly after this year.

 

[1927]

Yeah but airshows are a somewhat superfluous event. Music festivals more key to national culture. We could manage without airshows, but not music festivals.

Who says?

 

[Favelado]

[

Who says?

I've answered this above. So go and read the post.

 

[1927]

when the next air show at Farnborough

Dress them in all red costumes and they could do a Red Arrows type display, with death defying stunts as they dance towards each other and then move out of each other's way at the last second!

 

[1927]

These deaths were completely avoidable and the event in itself plays a non-crucial role in people's lives. Clubs, pubs, music concerts and festivals are intrinsic parts of British life. People taking risks with their own lives with drugs and alcohol not the same as being randomly burnt to death in your car when driving home. Who gives a shit if people aren't allowed to fly loop-the-loops over towns and villages anymore though? Utterly pointless deaths caused yesterday. Have airshows where planes do fly-bys and do low risk things by any means, but what the fuck is a plane doing pulling that kind of dodgy manoeuvre anywhere near where people are?

Oh do fuck off with your idea that everyone can risk whatever they like as long as it's an event you approve of shit!

I could easily say all drugs should be banned as they lead to a pointless waste of life and misery , but I don't!

 

[1927]

[

I've answered this above. So go and read the post.

That's 30 seconds of my life wasted!