7 dead after jet crashes onto highway during U.K. airshow
British police said seven people were killed Saturday after a jet crashed onto a roadway during an airshow in southern England.
The aircraft, believed to be a Hawker Hunter fighter jet participating in the Shoreham Airshow near Brighton, came down on a highway where it hit several vehicles.
In addition to the seven fatalities, local police said one patient with life-threatening injuries was taken to the hospital. Another 14 people were treated for minor injuries.
Eyewitnesses told the BBC the plane appeared to be performing a loop before it crashed.
"He'd gone up into a loop and as he was coming out of the loop I just thought, you're too low, you're too low, pull up," Stephen Jones, a witness at the scene, told the British media outlet. "And he flew straight into the ground either on or very close to the A27, which runs past the airport."
Ailish Southall was driving along the A27 with her two children when the plane came down close to them. "We were waiting for it to go back up and it didn't — it seemed to kind of split in two," she told the BBC.
"There were huge amounts of fire and we ran from the car to kind of avoid the debris because we were about 15 meters (50 feet) away, we were just across the road from where the accident happened," she added.
A local police officer, Tim Loughton, called it a "horrific" incident. "Given the many thousands of people attending the air show we thank God that the aircraft did not hit a larger crowd," he told a local news service.
Local news reports carried video and photographs of a fireball erupting near trees and huge plumes of thick black smoke rising, the Associated Press reported.