LONDON - A jet aircraft ploughed into several cars on a road near an airshow in southern England on Saturday, killing seven people, police said.

The Hawker Hunter fighter jet crashed onto the A27 road, close to an airport in Shoreham where the airshow was taking place, near the city of Brighton.

One person was being treated for life-threatening injuries and a further 14 people were being treated for minor injuries, police said in a statement.

Video footage posted online showed the plane in the process of executing an acrobatic loop before it hit the ground, causing an explosion which appeared to engulf some cars on a road.

"He'd gone up into a loop and as he was coming out of the loop I just thought, you're too low, you're too low, pull up," the BBC quoted an eyewitness, Stephen Jones, as saying.

"And he flew straight into the ground either on or very close to the A27, which runs past the airport."

Media reports said the pilot of the plane was pulled from burning wreckage.

The crash happened at around 1:20 pm (1220 GMT).

The Hawker Hunter is a single-seater jet which was developed by Britain in the 1950s.

Seven people were killed when two planes practising for an air show collided in Slovakia on Thursday. A U.S. Army parachutist died after he was involved in a mid-air collision with another parachutist at a Chicago air show last Saturday.