As the FAI World Aerobatics Championship began this weekend at the North Texas Regional Airport/Perrin Field near Sherman, Texas, the aerobatic community tragically lost one of its own. Former FAI Advanced World Champion Glen Dell died in an accident at an airshow in Secunda, South Africa.
Video footage shows Dell’s Red Bull Extra 300 in a downward spiral before crashing into the ground. The airplane was broken into pieces before it slowly caught fire. Eyewitnesses speaking with Johannesburg’s Eye Witness News partially blamed Dell’s death on the fire department, claiming that the airplane sat for three and a half minutes before the fire erupted and that the fire trucks took more than five minutes to arrive at the scene. A statement on Red Bull’s website said Dell was “airlifted to [a] hospital, where he unfortunately passed away due to the injuries he had sustained.”
Dell became the first South African to win the World Advanced Aerobatic Championships in 2004 and also raced in the Red Bull Air Race World Championships. In addition to his career as an aerobatic pilot, Dell was a commercial airline pilot flying for South African Airlines. He had well over 25,000 hours of flight time. Dell was 51 years old.
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