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The organiser of this year’s cancelled Pacific Airshow Gold Coast has said there was no other option but to axe the event to avoid a “compromised” experience.
Speaking to Australian Aviation, Kevin Elliott, chief executive of Code Four and director of the airshow, said the team had considered other options to hold the event after beach erosion scuppered its normal venue of Surfers Paradise, but found them all lacking.
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“Some of the other scenarios we considered were obviously the typical ones people might guess: relocating the event to somewhere else, shifting it here or there,” he said.
“Obviously, the challenge with that is airspace, as you might imagine – we can’t go closer to Gold Coast Airport without shutting the airport down.
“Ultimately, just to summarise all these different considerations – whether it’s date change, venue change, doing it up on the street versus doing it on the beach – it was either going to be a compromise on the ground or a compromise in the air, meaning we were likely going to have to change the dates and lose a lot of our military participation. Neither of those outcomes were acceptable for our team.”
According to Elliot, organisers are now focusing on making the 2026 event “what 2025 should have been”, and customers who bought pre-sale tickets will have the option of a full refund or having their tickets transferred to next year’s show.
“From the very onset of this project, 2023 was really a starting year, and the objective was to bring folks in, send them home, have everybody leave going, ‘wow, that was amazing’, and telling their friends as brand ambassadors that ‘you’ve got to come check this out’,” he said.
“We saw an increase in attendance from year one to year two, and we, based on the numbers, had seen a very appreciable increase in our ticket sales from year two to year three.
“Unfortunately, Mother Nature had a different plan for us, which is just completely out of our control, as optimistic as we want to be, so our plan is to bring back the event next year and really have it be commensurate with what that fourth year experience would have been like, or planned to be like, without having missed the 2025 show.”
Efforts to repair the beach at Surfers Paradise following Tropical Cyclone Alfred in March have been hampered by recurring king tides with accompanying large swells.
The Gold Coast has lost more than 4 million cubic metres of sand since the storm, with the beach level at Surfers Paradise dropping by around two metres, creating sand cliffs up to six metres high in some areas.
