Since the Shoreham Airshow crash, which claimed at least eleven lives, many have called for a review of airshow safety. They question the level of risk in having vintage jets fly acrobatic manoeuvres, and many displays have now been grounded. By focusing on the aircraft though, these people have failed to recognize the most dangerous element in the crash: not the Hawker Hunter jet, but the road it crashed into.



The A27 runs across Southern England from the plains of Wiltshire to the downs of East Sussex, starting near Salisbury and running parallel to England’s south coast to connect towns such as Fareham, Portsmouth, Chichester, Brighton and Lewes. It passes landmarks including Chichester Cathedral, Lewes Castle and the Long Man of Wilmington, but the pleasant scenery isn’t matched by the driving experience.

A report by West Sussex County Council described the road as “the most unreliable all purpose trunk road in England,” which, “experiences significant amounts of delay along the length of the route … Bottlenecks cause congestion, high accident rates, severance and diversion onto unsuitable routes. One such diversion was set up after the Shoreham airshow crash, and has already claimed a life: a head-on collision on Tuesday killed one driver and left the other with serious injuries.

He was far from the first. Desmond Llewellyn, who played ‘Q’ in 17 James Bond films, was killed in December 1999 when an overtaking attempt ended in a head-on crash with another car. He is perhaps the most famous person to have died on the road, but quieter tragedies pile up month after month, away from the public eye.

June saw a motorcyclist killed in a collision with a car at traffic lights on a stretch of the road passing through Fareham. Steven Copping was killed earlier in the year when the driver of a container lorry lost control, overturned and crushed his car.

Collisions with lorries are a recurring theme. Ernest Humphrey was killed last March, when the Vauxhall he was a passenger in was struck by another lorry. Both lorry drivers were charged with dangerous driving. Another lorry crash killed a car driver in January 2013.

Peter Sinden was killed in a head-on collision with a Land Rover in November 2013. Aaron Frost died in a “catastrophic impact” when a freak hailstorm caused him to lose control of his BMW in January 2014. The car skidded into a concrete barrier before colliding with a lamppost and eventually landing on its side in a ditch. On the same day, Dr. Jim Tiles was found dead with a fractured skull, tangled up in his bicycle. The coroner found the case ‘mystifying’ and recorded a verdict of accidental death - others suspected a hit-and-run driver.

The winter of 2011/12 saw three pedestrians killed on the same stretch of road, near Chichester, in the space of a few weeks. Two homeless men were run down within three days of each other while attempting to cross the A27 to reach a hostel. The following month, a middle-aged man was struck and killed by a Ford Focus. The charity running the hostel began a petition to improve lighting and signage on the road.

I could go on for a while. A search of news articles for deaths on the A27 brings up pages of results, along with other violent incidents – a car chase ending in a crash, shots fired by armed police into a suspect car, and even a Porsche driver who dragged a dog along at 70mph. You get the picture though; the A27 bears witness to a scale of human tragedy over time that dwarfs the impact of this one crash. A crash which was, by the way, the first airshow incident to have killed bystanders since 1952, 63 summers ago.

These are the stories from just one, fairly typical A-road. Across all the roads in Britain, 1,713 people died in 2013 (the last year for which figures are available). That’s actually a massive achievement – the figure was twice that and rising at the turn of the century. 80 cyclists were killed in London alone in the last few years, with 22,988 accidents serious enough to be reported to or attended by the police.

That drivers in Sussex are so concerned about aerobatic displays over the South Downs when they’re at constant risk of death from the hurtling chunks of metal they’re racing around in speaks volumes for our ability to accurately assess risks. And while people are quick to demand that air shows should only take place over the sea, I imagine many of them would baulk at the idea of, say, banning all BMWs from the road on the basis of one crash.