LETTER OF THE WEEK: US Jet crash was not in an isolated area

By Lincolnshire Echo  |  Posted: October 25, 2014

By S Brown

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I am writing to you to share some information about the RAF jet crash near Spalding.

Not only was it misreported by some of the major media companies, most notably Sky News, but the RAF were warned that this would happen some time ago but chose to ignore the warning.

Some of the media presented the story as happening in "an isolated area" without any danger to anyone and that the RAF pilot was in full control of the situation, as always.

This could not be further from the truth as the pilot apparently ejected from the jet while the aircraft continued on for almost a mile before crashing.

The impact site was dangerously close to a local school (at 3.30pm on a schoolday), in fact, a few hundred yards more and the press would have been reporting a national disaster of child deaths.

All of this is made worse because I actually wrote to the RAF in Lincolnshire a couple of years ago to complain about the frequent low-level flying of jets in our area.

In my letter, I asked why manoeuvres were necessary over cities and towns. I asked if they were planning to bomb civilians in the future in other lands.

I informed them that the noise of the jets was too loud and disturbed the peace.

I told them that the regular flying caused my disabled daughter agitation and disturbed sleep.

I also pointed out that, inevitably, a jet would come down in a populated area causing serious damage, and possibly death.

The official response I got back was rigid and unsympathetic.

I was bluntly told that the RAF have every legal right to fly at the times, speeds and heights that they were doing and that I could not challenge this, even on the grounds of safety concerns.

They did not even apologise for the disturbances they were causing.

The near miss, and the press portrayal of it as trivial(no doubt heavily influenced by the RAF officials), was an all too near example of the inevitable danger of military craft playing war games over people's heads!

If this event is ignored or trivialised, we may well be discussing actual tragedy in the future.

The media can put pressure on the RAF and the Government to ensure that this does not happen.

Too often in this country lessons are learned too late after the event, after tragic loss of life (Zeebrugge being a classic example).

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