The pilot whose plane crashed during the Shoreham airshow in 2015, killing 11 people, has said he cannot remember what happened, a jury at the Old Bailey heard.
Hill flew a 1950s Hawker Hunter fighter jet in the Shoreham airshow display on 22 August that year. The aircraft plunged to the ground and exploded into a fireball on the A27 in West Sussex after he failed to complete a loop manoeuvre.
Hill, 54, from Sandon, north Hertfordshire, denies 11 counts of manslaughter by gross negligence.
The former RAF pilot told the jury that while he remembered discussing the planned display with organisers beforehand, he had no memory of events between 19 August and when he awoke from an induced coma in hospital the following month.
When he was asked by Karim Khalil QC, defending, if he had any memory of taking off in the plane, or any memory of the display, Hill replied: “None at all.” He said he had spent most of the last three years trying to “resolve what happened”.
Asked if this had been easy for him, Hill replied: “No, because it caused a dreadful tragedy to a lot of people. I was the pilot, I was in charge of the aircraft.”
He claims he had “cognitive impairment” at the time of the incident; he had told medics who rushed to help him after the fireball on the A27 that he “blacked out” in the air, the court previously heard.
Jurors were told Hill had passed medical checks before the crash. They also heard that although he had several injuries from being thrown from the burning aircraft, tests and scans afterwards did not show any sign of any medical condition – including cognitive impairment.
Asked if “someone of clear mind” would have been able to divert the plane’s path during the display, he agreed, and added that they would have had “more than one opportunity”.
Khalil said Hill had been advised not to watch the final moments of the flight footage, when the crash occurred, because of “concerns of what it may trigger” for him. He said he could not understand the path the aircraft took because it made “no sense”.
He briefly left the witness box to demonstrate to jurors his plan for the display by walking around the courtroom with a model airplane. He said: “I don’t know what I did. I know what the aircraft did.”
The case continues.
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