On 7 August 1989, Sunderland Council put on a single-day airshow over the Roker and Seaburn seafronts. Free entry, anyone welcome, displays out over the sea so the beach itself became the grandstand. The organisers had not planned for what happened next: 250,000 people turned up. Council planners realised they had found something. From 1991 it was a two-day event. The Red Arrows made their first Sunderland appearance the same year. Soon it was three days, anchored on the final weekend of July, with displays beginning Friday evening and running through Sunday afternoon. Crews and aircraft came from across NATO and beyond - Russia, Hungary, Jordan, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands all sending teams over the years. The Royal Navy traditionally stationed a warship offshore as backdrop, usually one of the vessels adopted by the city.

The Red Arrows became regulars. So did the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Harrier GR9 with its impossible hovering capability, the F-16s in various national markings including the orange of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight with its Lancaster, Spitfire, and Hurricane. The RAF Falcons jumped in. The Royal Marines staged role demonstrations from 6 Assault Squadron. RAF Chinook display crews drawn from 18 and 27 Squadrons threw their twin-rotor helicopters through manoeuvres helicopters were not really supposed to do. The Black Cats Royal Navy display pair, The Blades aerobatic team, the Avro Vulcan XH558 in its preservation flying years - all of them appeared at some point. A Catalina flying boat, civil-registered G-PBYA, dropped its floats and made a water landing in 2007 in the kind of stunt that only really worked at a seafront airshow.

In 2007 Sunderland Council teamed up with Gentoo and CarbonNeutral North East to measure and offset the entire carbon footprint of staging that year's two-day show. There was a Green Village along the seafront with environmental stalls and educational displays. It was an unusual move for what was, after all, an event whose central attraction was burning aviation fuel above the North Sea. The exercise was partly serious and partly atonement. It also hinted at a tension that would, fifteen years later, kill the show. Newcastle International Airport was the main operating base for visiting aircraft through 2007, then Teesside took over for several years, then Newcastle came back in 2014 - the partnership with Newcastle was also a sponsorship, and the airshow benefited from the airport's marketing as well as its runway.

The airshow was cancelled in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was cancelled again in 2021 and 2022 for the same reason. Then in October 2022, Sunderland City Council announced that there were no plans to hold the airshow again. The reasoning given was the global climate emergency and the city's commitment to be carbon neutral by 2040. Whether the council's mind was genuinely changed by the climate argument or whether COVID had simply offered a politically convenient pause for an event whose costs were also rising, the result was the same. The biggest free airshow in Europe, after 33 years and an estimated 30 million cumulative spectators across its lifetime, simply stopped. The Roker and Seaburn seafronts return to their normal late-July rhythm now - holidaymakers, ice cream vans, the smell of the sea instead of jet exhaust. Some Wearsiders watch the calendar that last weekend in July out of habit. There is no longer anything to look up for.