Flinders wrote:
It's all about the risks we actively accept. People driving on the road had accepted the risk of driving, but not the risks of an airshow next to the road. However, I even heard one person suggest that simply by driving past an airfield they had accepted the extra risk, which is ridiculous...
ridiculous? Not at all. That is very similar to suggesting that if you drive near the sea, or over a bridge, there is no conceivable chance that your car might end up in the water, or that if you buy a house near an airport, you shouldn't have any increased risk that an aircraft is going to end up in your garden or drop 'loo ice' on your house or anything like that. Only a moron wouldn't ever think about such things, or not realise that there was some added risk.
Every time I drive past an airfield I'm looking out for planes; it is just common sense to do so. On the M25 near Heathrow you are regularly beneath 400 tonnes of aircraft that is only a few kts above its stall speed; in the event of catastrophic multiple engine failure (which can and does happen from time to time, mostly at take off or landing) it is quite likely that you will be sharing the road with a jumbo jet, and knowing that this might happen is a good start to self preservation.
If you are arguing that people driving on the A27 didn't know the airfield was there and didn't think about it, I'd argue that they perhaps should have done; its been while since I was down that way, but there are signs, right? If nothing else, if aware of aircraft motorists would then not be startled by aircraft suddenly appearing, which can and does cause accidents in its own right.
As it happens a commercial plane is liable to go in doing less than 100mph and you have a pretty good chance of seeing it coming; a military jet doing aerobatics, less so. Thus I'm not sure awareness would have made much practical difference in this event, I think that some people would have been killed in any event. But I would also suggest that there were very probably some folk who were keeping their eyes peeled, saw what was happening and took avoiding action, too.
As you say it is all about what people perceive to be 'acceptable risk' but that is not the same thing as 'no risk'. Commercial planes come down in built-up areas and squash people quite often; I think you should be aware of that possibility anytime you are near an airfield.
BTW There is a list of prangs here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_accidents_and_incidents_resulting_in_at_least_50_fatalitiesin which there were at least fifty casualties (all types) in the crash and on this list they identify bystander casualties. Bystanders are not killed in most crashes but they do form a significant percentage of the whole. You will note that there are about 500 items on this list which means that on average there are about five crashes per year that kill enough people to make it onto the list. The actual rate is a fair bit higher than that because although people have been flying for about 100 years, the vast majority of these prangs have happened in the last 65 years, since commercial aviation 'took off' (ahem). Very few (any?) items on this list are airshow accidents.
cheers