Day 87...

So, it rained ALL through last night. At one point it sounded as though the worlds biggest bucket was being emptied right outside the windows. It carried on raining for most of this morning as well - sometimes deluging, sometimes just a drizzle. We popped to get MrEH’s newspaper and got home mildly damp. Rumours abounded that the counterpart flypast in Paris in the late morning was being cancelled because of weather - not true, in fact Paris had glorious blue skies!

We left home to drive into London just after lunch - it was still spitting but - a literal glimmer of hope - the sun had started peeking through... by 3pm we were walking along the Embankment from a Tower Bridge with some incredible cloud formations above - some clearly still threatening some rain but importantly all nice and high, so unlikely to disrupt the actual route of the flypast. The 2 teams had made it across to RAF Brize Norton to refuel but reports were that the weather there was still pretty dreadful, it wouldn’t be the first time that a Flypast was scuppered by weather either at the operating base, or between that base and the target, frustrating for all concerned but can’t be helped.

By 4.15pm we had recced all possible locations and I had decided on plan A - Waterloo Bridge - giving a view which could - depending on the precise line taken by the jets - include the London Eye and the Thames in one direction, and the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the city skyline in the other - just so long as a bus didn’t draw up at the wrong moment! Better still though, those superb cloud formations were hanging around, particularly in the St Paul’s direction. 4.40pm - takeoff time and we started picking up snippets of radio transmissions on the scanner confirming that 18 jets were in the air and heading our way...

At bang on 5pm the coloured smoke appeared over the roof of the Ministry of Defence building - I fired off a couple of shots with my 10 - 18mm lens on the Canon 80D, then hastily switched to the 7DMk2 hanging over the other shoulder ready to shoot the remainder with the 24 - 105mm as it became apparent the wider angle wasn’t going to give quite the composition I was hoping for. As the jets roared over I dashed across the pavement, hopped onto the barrier and framed up ready to get the departing shots with the Cathedral - massive thanks to the lovely van driver who held back as long as he could from blocking my view! The whole thing was over in around 45 seconds - which actually feels like quite a long time photographically, although people watching always feel it is over in a flash!

As always looking around and seeing the reactions of the people around was a definite highlight - a flypast puts smiles on faces, all the more so for those who didn’t know about - and weren’t expecting - it. People continue to stand and watch for a few moments more as the lingering red, white & blue smoke drifts across the sky - before carrying on with their day. You can imagine the conversations around dinner tables that evening “Wow - guess what I saw on the way home!”

Robyn

(To reiterate from yesterday - in London it is still being requested that public transport use is for essential travel only, and had I needed to use the tube, or buses I would not have made the trip in. As it was we drove as far as Bermondsey, just under an hour, parked there and walked the rest.)