Shoreham Airshow tragedy: ‘People looked at each other as the reality of what had happened sank in’

I was bending over our picnic basket when my dad said ‘he’s crashed’.

I didn’t really take in what he’d said, I think I smiled at him, and he repeated it and said ‘he has’.

When I turned around and saw thick black smoke on the skyline, the smile left my face.

People around us started to stand up, many walking slowly in the direction of the crash site.

Everything was quiet, people looking at each other as the reality of what had just happened sank in.

My husband Alan headed over to see what he could see, while I sternly told the children they couldn’t go as well, and tried my best to distract them with goodies from the lunch bag.

Crowds parted as police cars and ambulances moved through the showground and the voice over the tanoy said everything possible was being done.

People were reaching for their mobile phones, to share the news and check on loved ones, but all I got was a beep as the call failed to connect. After many frustrating attempts I finally got a call through to our newsroom. Our reporters were already on the scene, filing stories as more details of the horror emerged.

Being at the airshow that afternoon felt life being in a bubble. Without working phones, we had little idea of the scale of the incident outside, although the continuing closure of the roads around us preventing us from leaving, told us it was bad.

Words were exchanged in hushed tones with stallholders. ‘The plane came down in the road’, ‘did you see the fireball?’, ‘they pulled the pilot out, but other people have died’.

One trader told me: “I was serving a woman when it happened, she said ‘I hope that’s not my husband’.”

Everyone stopped and watched as a lone Vulcan bomber made a flypast, and applause rippled through the showground.

The moving tribute was only the second flight of the day that we’d seen, having arrived just minutes before the crash. Traffic queues had slowed our short journey from Storrington to a crawl, much of which had been made to the whiney chorus of ‘when are we going to get there?’

We had observed as we finally arrived at the airfield that the A27 was doing its best impression of a carpark - nothing was moving. That image came back to me when we learned that the plane had crashed onto the road in a rain of wreckage and fire.