The Hunter had been the opening act of the afternoon display session at the two-day Shoreham Airshow, held in aid of the Royal Air Forces Association. Conditions were hot and sunny with a light crosswind. The jet made a low pass along the runway from south to north, then turned for a second pass in the opposite direction. As it neared the airport, pilot Andy Hill pulled the aircraft up into an inside loop. The manoeuvre should have been started at 500 feet and 350 knots, reaching 4,000 feet at the top of the arc. Instead, the loop began from just 200 feet, and the Hunter reached only 2,700 feet at barely 105 knots before gravity reclaimed it. The aircraft struck the A27, breaking into four pieces on impact. Eight vehicles were destroyed. Among those killed was the chauffeur of the wedding car, who never reached the bride waiting at her home.

A de Havilland Sea Vixen, already airborne for the next display, instead flew overhead at altitude and departed. An Avro Vulcan, due thirty minutes later, performed a solemn tribute flypast before the show was closed. The second day was cancelled. Within hours, the Civil Aviation Authority grounded every civilian-registered Hawker Hunter in Britain and banned aerobatic manoeuvres by vintage jet aircraft over land, restricting them to high-level flypasts only. The investigation by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch concluded that the crash resulted from pilot error: Hill had failed to recognise the aircraft was too low to complete the loop. He was charged with eleven counts of manslaughter by gross negligence, but was acquitted by a jury at the Old Bailey in March 2019. Seven years later, in December 2022, a coroner ruled the victims had been unlawfully killed, describing Hill's flying as "exceptionally bad" and the airshow's safety plan as "not fit for purpose."

The people who died on the A27 that afternoon were not spectators who had accepted the small risk of watching aircraft perform. They were motorists on a public road, going about ordinary Saturday errands. Two were footballers for Worthing United, heading to a game they would never play. The wedding for which the Daimler was en route went ahead, but in grief rather than celebration. Families of the victims endured years of legal proceedings -- a criminal trial, an inquest delayed by the pandemic, appeals that stretched into 2025 -- with what the presiding judge called extraordinary dignity. A permanent memorial now stands near the Shoreham Tollbridge, along the banks of the River Adur, close to where the aircraft came down.

The Shoreham crash reshaped British airshow culture. The CAA's tightened regulations increased costs so significantly that many regional shows were cancelled outright. The Llandudno Airshow folded. The Red Arrows switched from aerobatic displays to simple flypasts at Farnborough in 2016. By 2019, public flying days at Farnborough were discontinued entirely, with organisers citing tighter regulations and falling visitor numbers in the wake of Shoreham. No further Shoreham Airshow has taken place. The vintage warbird community, which had thrived for decades on the spectacle of Cold War-era jets performing low-level aerobatics, found itself operating under restrictions that fundamentally altered what pilots could do and where they could do it. The debate continues over whether the right balance has been struck between public safety and aviation heritage, but the eleven people who lost their lives on a summer afternoon in West Sussex remain the unanswerable argument at the centre of that conversation.