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Hunter crash at Shoreham

I should read the report before commenting but there was a lot more behind this, like appallingly low currency of the pilots of these types…

How the crash happened is, as you say, obvious at the time.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

I should read the report before commenting

I read about ten pages with the conclusions and recommendations while sitting around in Turin. This is 50% more than a professor reads on average of the dissertation of his ph.d. students.

Last Edited by what_next at 03 Mar 19:52
EDDS - Stuttgart

I think that the reason it is so long and detailed is that the whole GA regulatory regime, trail-blazed by the CAA and followed by EASA, is based on informed consent among participants and the fact that there have been virtually no deaths among uninvolved third parties for many decades.

The deaths of eleven completely uninvolved people, people who hadn’t even bought an airline ticket, people who had assumed that they were completely detached from the risks of aviation, could result in a complete rethink of how GA, indeed aviation, is regulated. It is potentially huge and requires a huge amount of thought.

EGKB Biggin Hill

Timothy – respectfully I think your view is overly dramatic. It was a terrible incident. There are lessons to be learnt, but there are many risks we hope we are detached from, but which still cause loss of life. This was such a case and has already had a substantial impact on displays, but there are no grounds I hope for it impacting elsewhere. I am afraid aircraft will continue to run out of fuel and have other incidents whether they have one engine or two, and very occasionally there will third party loss of life, but it is difficult to see that the risk could be any further mitigated or that there is a regulatory appetite to do so.

Well, Vauxhall had impacts, and that was just one uninvolved fatality.

I do take comfort from the fact that the recommendations are all about airshows and ex-military jets, but the big raison d’etre behind the relaxation of oversight of GA was the low risk to the uninvolved public, based on historical data, and now we have had twelve deaths of passers by. That is unprecedented.

EGKB Biggin Hill

Yes, but I think there are sufficient difference to distinguish this from GA per se.

Agreed, but that is not my point.

Until 2013, GA reps in the UK could, and very often did, say “there is no need to over regulate us, we simply never kill uninvolved third parties. We can be left to ourselves.

After Vauxhall that argument became a little thin.

The Shoreham tragedy, quite apart from all the personal grief it caused, made that something we could never say. A weapon was taken from our armoury for ever.

Since Shoreham, for nearly 20 months, the CAA GA Unit has been hugely focussed on it, to the exclusion of the many things that it was doing to deregulate and liberalise. That was for lack of resource, we assume, not for lack of will.

But the question now arises as to whether they will have the appetite to throw themselves back into that process with their earlier gusto.

Only time will tell.

EGKB Biggin Hill

Oh, I have been forgetting Glasgow, my huge apologies to any families there.

So the number is 22 in two and a half years, after decades of none.

EGKB Biggin Hill

Timothy, yes but your “argument” has changed from a “complete rethink of how GA, indeed aviation is regulated” to a possible lack of will to further “deregulation and liberalisation”.

Fwiw i dont think this incident is seen as a GA accident, far more a reason to rethink airshows which has already happened and may yet go further.

I don’t think the dodgy stuff which went on in the Shoreham case is applicable to normal GA flying.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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