Just considering how many more orders of magnitude hours or passenger-miles of commercial aviation there are than airshow aviation, it seems a no-brainer. I’m not up for doing a full calculation of this, but one can do a quick comparison of accident count by going through the “List of air show accidents and incidents in the 21st century” and “List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft” pages on Wikipedia. From 2017 through the present there were 27 accidents at airshows, compared to 84 in commercial flight, of which 19 of the former and 27 of the latter produced at least one death (including passengers, crew, and airfield staff who died of injuries after the accident). I find that to be convincing evidence that air shows produce orders of magnitude more deaths (per hour or per passenger/crew-mile) than commercial flight.

As far as ending the flight demonstrations? End those and you might as well do away with them entirely – without them, there’s no real draw for them except for aviation geeks like me, and I could do that at a good aviation museum. In the back of my mind, I’ve always wondered if air shows’ appeal was something Iike that for auto racing – some folks go for the thrill of seeing these beats go all out, but you find yourself wondering how many go hoping there’ll be a crash or at least a near-miss.

I’d do anything to go to an airshow when I was a kid. By my 20s I’d seen three planes crash & one skydiver die. (One of the crashes was the Tu-144 — I simply couldn’t believe what I was seeing; you know how it is.)
Maybe my very presence is a jinx.

In the past 40 years I’ve rarely been to one. Not only have I seen it all before, but these things serve as a pretext for flagrant militarism. Maybe it is time to call it quits.

The most recent catastrophe was partly the result of too many planes in the air at the same time. If you look at the film, there’s a B-24 a short distance from the B-17. That should never happen.

I’m a little prejudiced, I suppose, because I’ve flown on a B-24 and B-17, and had scheduled a lift on a B-25 that was cancelled after the B-17 crash in Connecticut.

I volunteer at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, so I see vintage planes in static displays all the time, and delight in them. But airplane’s natural setting is the air. In “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” the rickety ancient planes on the ground are more than a little silly, but once the race begins and we see them in the air where they belong, they’re grand.

Perhaps a solution would require a far more sedate performance by the planes in the air. Limit them to basic fly-bys. Only one formation in the air at the time. No maneuving in formations. Or even no formations at all. Etc.