How about simply requiring a warning on tickets and advertisements that watching air racing carries inherent risk.

sad that I hear the investigation results of an Airshow accident that took place in the USA on an Aussie website, nothing here is the USA in the filtered news media, Slowburn.. gotta agree, some shows involve RISK you want to see things up close and personal, there is risk, I agree with your comment.

I read an interesting speculation that the seat back had collapsed in the high G race turns. The pilot was not visible in the canopy during the crash footage.. since they are strapped in tight, he should have been visible, conscious or not. Also detailing the aircraft trajectory as matching how an aircraft might react with those sort of control inputs as the pilot falls backwards.

Yeah heaps of good videos on Youtube - "Vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmm "SMACK" - a cloud of dust and smoke and a million bits of gravel and shrapnel...
"Ooooooo that was quick!"
I am always amazed that if a FAST vehicle is going to leave a track - it's almost never going to happen when running in a straight line, and the crowd is parallel to, and set back from the track; but where does the crowd like to sit?
Piled up around the corner where the car is most likely to go, when it goes around the corner, which is the time and place that it is most likely to go spearing off the track......
There are places around the race track I like to stay and others I don't.
So to have the aircraft going LOW and FAST - past the crowd - I mean it's RACING........ While shit does not happen, it's hard being on top of all the fine little details and unforeseen circumstances and combinations there of.... and things do happen.
I just find that the air craft ought to have space to turn and then straighten out and then go past the crowd, rather than taking a path, that if something does go wrong - it takes them in the direction of the crowd.
I also liked the videos that show that happens when you get an aircraft at high speed, low altitude and some kind of epic failure does occur...... No room for error.
Sad... but at least it was quick.

I do a lot of rally racing/spectating/organizing and you know, things that should be obvious just don't make it through the brains of some people, and I don't understand why.
That course (this is the first time I've seen it) should have been ruled out at the beginning - as j-stroy said, vehicles follow a (mostly) straight vector when something happens so anything (ANYTHING) that went wrong after pylon 7 and the home pylon was going to affect spectators. You NEVER put spectators/bystanders/innocents outside of a high-speed turn (or even, in rally, a low speed turn - it is possible to hook a tire and have a car go over and out) - it should always be INSIDE the turn (physics say it's nearly impossible for things to go IN) or along the straight.
And to Slowburn - you're half right. I agree that people need to realize that racing events carry an element of risk, but the organizers of this event have little excuse - with this course design, an accident like this was foreseeable and could have been prevented/mitigated with very little impact on the race.

I think that if the audience is placed closer to pylon 7, there is a far lower chance of a plane crashing into it...they would have enough time to straighten out at that point, and if they did mess up and have to crash they'd probably have enough time to steer away from the crowd...

I am a photo/journalist and was covering the race from the No. 2 pylon when the accident happened. The race planes were on a path parallel to the crowd and a considerable distance from the crowd when things went awry. I have always felt that the race planes were located too far from the stands to keep it interesting but this is from a guy who likes being at the pylons when they come whizzing by at 400 mph. Moving the course further away from the stands might not make that much difference at the speed that these birds travel. There is always going to be a degree of risk and most people that attend know that. My heart goes out to the victims and their families but most of them would want things to continue despite the risk.

"Two mistakes high." That's a common saying for pilots, especially when learning to fly, even for radio controlled model aircraft.
If you screw up, you have twice the altitude you need to recover. After getting back to stable flight, climb back to two mistakes high altitude before you try again what you screwed up.

Jimmy Leeward was 74.
Bob "Hurricane" Hannah,the famous motocross rider, took up Unlimted racing and also blacked out once but came to a few thousand feet UP instead of down.
I'm not saying anything bad about Jimmy.
It's just that there's no way the FAA would allow passengers for hire under such dangerous conditions(these plus the ones already discussed)- so why allow spectators underneath?
Racing over the water is safer.
If we're going to do this why not bring back Boardtrack racing?
Look it up.

I was there in the grandstands, about 120' from the crash site. The race course shape and proximity had no direct determination of the crash site for this particular accident. The Ghost went vertical just after pylon 8, did a 1/4 roll while going straght up, slowed down due to a less than 1:1 hp to weight ratio. Then it did a 1/4 loop to the inverted, heading towards and beyond the crowd 1/2 mile from the crash site. Then it did another 1/4 loop to the near vertical decent, both travelling back towards the crowd and towards show center. The plane travelled for 10 seconds at 400+mph (1.11 miles) with effectively a random destination. The crowd would have to be more than a mile away to have been out of this particular danger zone.
From the moment the plane went vertical, the pilot had no further awareness. While some have speculated that the pilot heroically caused the nose up that avoided me in the grandstands and even more loss of life, the high speed nose up control that sent the plane vertically in the first place was the only thing that saved my bacon.
The audience cannot sit inside the course, as that is the emergency landing area and must remain free of whoffo's. Also all pilots know that landing inside will not injure the non-spectators in the nearby town. Pilots are first at risk, crowd is 2nd, and the townfolks need to be a distant 3rd. There have been plenty of pilots who never again left the infield. Only a handful have ever hit outside the track.
Also with the crowd inside, they could not see 4/5'ths of the course. Watching air races from your couch doesn't do it justice.
And yes, I already have tickets for the next race.