It's the air show at the annual Canadian National Exhibition, or 'Ex', a sort of county fair on steroids.
The Ex was one of the first topics of conversation among the kids after we arrived in Toronto because we passed it on our slow way home from the airport. "Can we go? And when will they have the airshow?" asked the youngest, looking out her window, staring upward at a ride that seemed to swing occupants into the clouds. She had already had two visits to the amusement park on the Brighton Pier and one to Canada's Wonderland this summer. (She did wangle a trip to the Ex, as it happens, but not during the air show.)
"In a week," I said. "For Labor Day." Well, it is now Labour Day weekend and the jets make a huge racket over our house on their way to the lakefront to perform their daring tricks. I cringe even more than I did in previous years because only a couple of weeks ago we were on the fringe of the Shoreham air show tragedy.
On our last Saturday afternoon in England I sat with two friends in a shady grove in Bentley, East Sussex, while our daughters swung from ropes attached to treetops. A beep indicated a WhatsApp message on one friend's phone and she read it out. "I heard about the air crash. Are you okay?" The three of us automatically looked up. The only things crashing through air were our children, who were secured by harnesses. My husband, returning from Norway, had sent a message only moments earlier to say he had landed safely, thank goodness. A quick internet trawl found early reports of the horrific crash by an old WW2 jet onto a busy road, the A27 in Shoreham. We had driven the same road, further east, an hour earlier, to reach our bucolic woods.
Yes, we were okay, but I feel have been on the fringe of too many air show disasters (which I know is a silly statement as any is too many). The Shoreham crash happened on a stretch of road only a few miles from our former home in Hove. I travelled it often. The airshow is, or at any rate was, annual, and we saw some of it most years that we lived in Sussex, though without ever attending it on purpose. One year we were picking blackberries along the link trail to the South Downs Way while airplanes were doing tricks over our shoulders. Another year we watched it in the background as elder son's football team, the Southwick Rangers, played on a pitch at the edge of Shoreham. Parental attention wandered from the action on the field to the action in the air. A murmur went up from some of the adults on the sidelines. "Where did it go? Did you see it come back?" An old warplane, flown by an ace, had crashed. The pilot died.
We used to have occasional outings to the Shoreham Airport (now renamed Brighton City Airport, I notice), the base for the airshow. It's tiny and in Art Deco style, the only airport I know to which the adjective 'charming' could be applied. When characters in Agatha Christie stories are filmed flying someplace (usually Paris), footage of the Shoreham Airport is used. We enjoyed going to the little airport cafe for tea and cakes, because it's that cute. I helped organize a field trip there for younger son's primary school class, during a unit on transportation.
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| 'Brighton City' aka Shoreham Airport (from Worthing & Adur Chamber of Commerce) |
Finally (I hope finally) many many years ago, when I was an undergraduate studying at the University of Sussex, I went with some friends to see the Red Arrows, the British team of elite performing fighter jets. Actually I'm not sure they fight, but they do perform. I watched the team swoop and dive over the Brighton Pier, a few yards off the seafront. The pilots pretended almost to collide with one another. They reminded me of the preschool boys I babysat that summer, feinting and saying 'ka-pow' with toy cars in their tiny fists. The Red Arrows divided into two groups, four heading west, five east. Then they looped around, the western group heading east and the eastern ones west, racing toward one another with trailing streams of exhaust so they looked like scarlet fingernails on clasping hands. The planes slid past one another with seemingly no room to spare.
"Wait. One is missing," said my friend. We counted. She was right. We could see only eight planes turn tail and head north, ending the show. In those pre-internet days, it took some time for the news to filter through. One of the pilots had panicked, thinking his shiny red fingernail was about to crash into his opposite number, and he had ejected, leaving his plane hurtling uncontrolled toward the pier, which was packed with onlookers and consumers of fish and chips.
It missed. It also missed every one of the myriad small boats bobbling in the sea. The pilot lived, to face disciplinary measures. The plane plunged deep beneath the water about fifty yards from the pier and the military quickly erected a security cordon around the area until they could retrieve their treasure.
So that makes three air show disasters in my sight or near vicinity. And I'm not an airshow aficionado, which makes me think that a) airshows are too often disastrous or b) it's me.
I'll go with (a). So, why are they allowed?
"You could ban them but pilots taking calculated risks in exciting manoeuvres is what people want to see... This is a gladiatorial display – that is what people go to see,” said David Learmount, a 'consulting editor' (what's that?) at FlightGlobal magazine.
Gladiatorial, indeed. Mr. Learmount seems to think that's a good thing. Would Spartacus agree?
The Canadian equivalent to the Red Arrows is the Snowbirds. The name makes them sound delightful and friendly, but these are loud, fast, frightening machines that consume masses of fuel and create more noise pollution than the M25, for the purpose of entertainment. They scare the horses, along with the dogs and small children beneath their path. This weekend they will shriek overhead while I wrestle with my unruly squash blossoms.
