'Casualties' as airshow plane crashes into cars on A27 at Shoreham - BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34027260

Think it's time we had a long hard think about these shows

Shoreham air show disaster – in pictures | UK news | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/galler ... n-pictures

Those are some brilliant and horrifying photos...

Another one from North Weald. The Gnat that crashed at Carfest was based there too.

Just seen the video footage of the crash.
They really need to have a minimum planned height at airshows to allow a margin for error

I'd say at present there's far from enough information available to know if that would have made any difference at all in the circumstances. Plenty of scenarios that could have lead to this happening where being a bit higher wouldn't have made any material difference.

There is, there's a 'base height' that planes aren't allowed to go under along with a regulation as to how far away from any crowd they have to stay.

The things is crashes tend to happen when things go mechanically wrong with the plane and/or there's a basic piloting error. In both of those cases, the pilot didn't plan to have the plane in that position. If things have gone horribly wrong, the fact there's a regulation about keeping above a certain height is kind of irrelevant - gravity doesn't give a [LIFTED] about regulations. The regulation is there to ensure in the event of an accident/failure the plane doesn't crash into the crowd who have come to observe the event ( I believe this happened at Farnborough in the 60's maybe and many people were killed or injured. The footage I've seen is black & white..) but that doesn't mean the plane will always come down somewhere safe.If you've got a massive metal object part filled with highly flammable liquid coming down over a populated area, the chances of it missing everyone unfortunately isn't that great.

So, essentially, we either accept flight demonstrations have a risk which we can't entirely mitigate, or we just don't have them in populated areas. They do the demos miles from anywhere and everyone watches them on youtube or whatever.

Yeah, my father was there, in the crowd. He was one of the lucky ones. He saw people left and right dropping like flies, but he came out of it unscathed! Incredibly lucky!

But as you say, if there is a catastrophic failure, there isn't much the pilot can do to obey regulations. If the controls jam, flame out etc. then at the heights, even the minimum heights for an air show, he doesn't have much time to react. A flame out on something like a Hunter will probably take several seconds to counteract, more seconds than the down-side of a loop, for example. To cope with that you would probably have to add an extra 15,000 feet to the minimum height to be "safe", but you wouldn't be able to see the plane. It is all about trade-offs.

Plus, the regulations for an airshow assuming relatively modern aircraft aren't going to really apply when you are talking about one of the first jets to come into service.

Not knowing exactly what happened, I wouldn't want to pre-judge the outcome, but a catastrophic mechanical failure on a 60+ year old aircraft doing acrobatics isn't out of the question.

True, but a higher altitude would thive them more time to react if the plane was even partially controlable.

True and more time for people on the ground to realise that things are going wrong and hopefully get out of the way if it isn't..

However there is a downside - if the failure is catastrophic, the higher altitude the plane is at when it happens the bigger the possible area within which it may finally crash. The 'area of possible impact' is essentially a cone projected from the point of failure onto the ground as a circle. If you want to be certain of the plane landing in a particular 'safe' area in the event of failure, you actually want it to stay as near to that bit of ground as possible, both horizontally and vertically.

There are obviously lots of variables that define where an aircraft crashes relative to the point of failure so there are no hard & fast rules. The only actually 'safe' events are the ones that happen over the sea away from the shore.