Could it be the debris from a failed backyard experiment? Someone playing at making a turbine or rocket and BANG! Bits get airbourne and come down a couple of streets away.

Here she is when I saw her in the Boneyard in 2008.

That is one very wrinkled skin.

Yes.

Moggy

Well that really surprises me! Must have been a short display.

At least when and if the pilot recovers and recollects the details of what happened, we will know what happened and the speculation will be ended.

I don’t think there has been too much speculation. What I am seeing is an inability to focus. remember when Micheal Ryan went crazy and shot up Hungerford with an AK 47 and the government response was a ban on penknives? This is the same sort of thing. the discussion is almost taking it as read that the aircraft was engaged in empire test pilots school at the very limits of control at huge and doubtless entertainingly thrilling risk like a circus without a safety net. The aircraft carried out a common easy manoeuvre that happens at just about every extremity of just about every display and followed a morning of pitts and extras really throwing shapes in the sky in true “stunt” flying. There is a risk of responding to events which have happened only in the popular imagination.

This aircraft was not engaged in aerobatics per se. Any serious display manoeuvres will clearly be centred upon “crowd centre” and be aimed at displaying the aircraft to the display line. This was an aircraft having completed a flyby simply repositioning for another run. I can’t be the only person who has watched a display consisting of flybye… wingover…. flybye…. wingover and so on and on. in this case the pilot employed a vertical manoeuvre to return along the display line, looked like an Immelmann to me but it all went wrong. One thing that has occurred to me only this morning given the ghost of Farnborough 1952 is that it was a bit spooky seeing the still burning fireball overflown by of all things a DH110.

I recognise that with so many experienced and proud pilots on the forum and speculation must appear distasteful. Please understand that for those of us who were there it was a traumatic experience and it is helpful to “Talk it out”. That doesn’t need to include speculation but I can think of no group that would be more understanding of the horror of the event.
I have not speculated and will not. I have learned that eye witness testimony is of little value since so many accounts differ that I cannot trust my own observations. I have like most here spent a lot of time watching aircraft and seen hunters many, many times both in service and displayed. I always considered the hunter as one of the last dogfighters that manoeuvred by grapping the air as opposed to the high energy manoeuvres where thrust takes the place of aerodynamic agility. There will always be a lag at the bottom of a manoeuvre like this but that lag seemed to go on and on to impact. I really would have expected a healthy hunter to have leapt skywards long before. Sorry again if it seems morbid to re hash this but I cannot get this out of my mind, I could see it about to happen and almost feel in some stupid way that I should have said something to warn him!!!!!

Looking at these images it occurs to me that the civil ambulance helicopters like those seen in the US, UK and Germany don’t carry red crosses.
Odd. They usually have bright paint schemes and plenty of identification so everyone knows what they are, but they (and most ambulances here in the US…and I don’t recall seeing any in the UK, though I certainly could have missed one) don’t carry the international symbol of relief/medical transport.

Also, anyone else find it a bit ironic that communist (and presumably atheist) countries also use the red cross?

That is a rather strange thing, come to think of it. Also, Islamic countries use the red crescent, not the red cross. I have seen a few exceptions, though, like an Afghan Mi-8 that was marked with a red cross.

It’s not odd for atheist countries to use the red cross. Two intersecting lines is not the copyright property of Christianity and the red cross is a secular symbol being an inversion of the Swiss flag and not a Christian symbol at all. Such assumptions are doubtless the reason why red crescent and star has arisen despite a perfectly good international symbol already existing. The red cross is the antithesis of a religious symbol, it is a symbol of humanity.