THE traffic chaos at last weekend’s Teesside Airport Air Show has undermined people’s confidence in attending a similar event in the future.

Everyone who got in seems to have had a good time, but you’d be extremely brave to buy a ticket to next year’s show given the wide scale experiences and disappointments of this year.

So it is right that a thorough review is held and it is good that the organisers are doing the decent thing and refunding those who couldn’t get in.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this is that a private traffic management company and all the relevant local authorities signed off all the plans. If the air show organisers had put on a show without any planning, you could understand the chaos that ensued, but they didn’t. They clearly consulted the relevant experts and considered the possible alternatives, like a park and ride system.

The region can successfully hold large concerts at football stadiums, but those do not have the added dimension of holidaymakers mingling with showgoers and tourist flights mingling with Red Arrows – this complication is one of the reasons the airshows stopped in the 1990s when the airport had a successful tourist offer.

So the review is vital, concluding with a thorough explanation, if people are to have confidence in attending a similar event in the future. The region does not want to gain a poor reputation when it comes to putting on a show.