A tiny bit normal...

 

This week has felt like something approaching a bit of normality is beginning to creep back in. Firstly, I’m looking forward to my first airshow of the year at lovely Shuttleworth tomorrow - there will be brilliant people, and good banter, and biscuits (always biscuits!) and above all lots of fabulous warbirds to watch and to photograph. Bliss! Not the rather wonderful old girl above though, no, that shot was taken earlier in the week up at RAF Coningsby when I ventured up for a trip which I knew would include not only some BBMF flying in the shape of the Dakota pictured above, but also something rather faster, noisier and altogether whizzier...

Yes - that’s the 2021 display pilot practising his display routine - and a first watch suggests that it is QUITE the routine, too! I was lucky with this sky too - the weather forecast said grey and overcast, but when I arrived in Lincolnshire there was a nice little patch of blue in not far off the right place, and sure enough it lingered around with some attendant sunshine for just long enough! 

I’ve got a soft spot for the Dakota - often overlooked in favour of her more famous BBMF hangar-mate the wonderful Avro Lancaster, and I am nothing if not a keen supporter of the underdog as those who remember my speedway days will be all too aware of! The Dak is a beauty of an aircraft though, and with a fantastic history too both in military and domestic service. 

That blue sky came into its own when it came to perfectly showcasing the Typhoon’s exit from the display, too - the traditional exit when the conditions allow is a fast vertical spiralling climb - as you can see from the photos above this looks great when seen from almost directly underneath, and the blast from the reheat looks fantastic against that vivid blue sky, too! 

Also in an aviation vein but slightly earlier in the week, we had an unexpected and very local visit from the East Anglian Air Ambulance too. 

Sitting in the front room after eating our tea, we heard a helicopter passing over somewhat lower than we are used to, so I opened the tracking app to take a look - and sure enough confirmed that it very much appeared that the Eurocopter EC145 had just landed in a nearby playing field. We threw on shoes and jackets and walked through the woods to go and take a look. Thankfully soon after we arrived the pilot confirmed that they had been stood down as the incident was deemed not serious enough to require their team’s skills. We quite often see the Herts & Essex machine locally but very rarely this one - it was called upon because it was already in the air returning from a previous shout when the call came through for this one. 

As if a LOT of photos from the Coningsby trip weren’t enough to be working on, I also ventured to Imperial War Museum Duxford for a brief visit yesterday afternoon. I have taken a year’s membership to the museum - in part because it includes free entry to the “flying days” they have planned and in part because it’s been such a difficult years for museums generally, and in particular those who rely on big events like airshows. It felt like an easy way of doing something - and gives me some benefits also of course, including the ability to just pop up there for an hour or so as I did yesterday. 

That is the Aircraft Restoration Company Hispano Buchon taxiing out ready for a run through of the display it will be performing at Shuttleworth - it’s a fantastic although slightly odd looking aircraft, but all those blurred edges on the camo pattern make it an absolute devil to photograph! There were also several Spitfires up and about so my trip up was very much worthwhile! 

All in all, it has felt like a rather aviation-filled week, and with more yet to come! 

Robyn 

Another one bites the dust...

 

BBMF Fighters

This year just keeps on kicking us in the teeth - the latest disappointment being the cancellation of Duxford’s Battle Of Britain airshow which was due to be happening this weekend. Following the introduction of the Government’s new “Rule Of Six” the organising team decided it was no longer logistically possible, and it was cancelled last Friday. The cancellation was made even more poignant as this week saw Battle Of Britain day - all the more meaningful with this year being the 80th anniversary of the Battle. There were so many grand plans for the anniversary most of which have, by necessity, been scrapped. On VE Day alone the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight had over 100 flypasts planned - it would have been the busiest day ever for the flight until Covid came along and rendered all the carefully crafted plans redundant.

Sad as the Duxford cancellation is, there IS no choice. I for one was beginning to get a bit twitchy about how they planned to make it possible, and whether the majority really would take any notice of requests to social distance. No clear information had been provided giving reassurance on this, which didn’t help. Rumour was that people were going to be corralled into number-limited compounds, meaning that those who had bought tickets individually intending to meet up with friends on the day would end up standing alone - not really the way most of us plan to visit an airshow the size of Duxford. That IS just rumour though, we may never know what actually was planned. It is fair to say though that to have gone ahead with the show and been responsible for a Coronavirus outbreak which could have lead to deaths both among those attending and in the local area would have been grossly irresponsible, and as the organisers have to be applauded for taking the decision that they did. The majority are accepting of this if social media is anything to go on, with only a tiny handful of negative reactions, and those mostly from those who are blatant Covid-deniers (and probably flat-earthers, as well!) and so can be safely ignored as having nothing worthwhile to say. Most agree that it’s better to be safe. 

I now have one final shot at actually seeing an airshow this year with the planned show at Headcorn in a couple of weeks time. Smaller than most shows, they have also limited numbers, and I understand have plans in place that will hopefully enable it to go ahead although I won’t be too hopeful until I’m actually on the airfield! My fingers are crossed though - it would be great to see some more warbirds flying this year! 

Robyn 

Five favourites...

OK, after the action of last week, I couldn't resist doing this one...so here we go with five favourite Aviation pics...

The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight at Wings and Wheels, Dunsfold - 2013. I have history with these guys - firstly pretty much every time I see them anywhere one or other of the planes gets broken shortly beforehand, so actually seeing the Lancaster AND a Spitfire AND a Hurricane together is a bit of a rarity. Then to add to that it's damned difficult to get all three planes nicely spaced in a shot, with decent lighting and exposure. And that is precisely why this shot makes me smile!

Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team the Red Arrows - Dartmouth Regatta 2009. A completely unique display viewpoint up on Jawbones Hill overlooking the river valley and looking down on parts of the display. The more usual backdrop for air display photos is without question sky, but here you can get trees, fields, and even, as in this shot....houses, cars and people. Fab! 2014? Yes, I'll be climbing the hill again!

Ahh....Duxford 2013 - or "The Red Arrows Display that really shouldn't have happened" - just 10 minutes before the scheduled start time we were sheltering in the car from a torrential downpour. The majority of people left from where we were standing as it seemed certain that they were going to turn back to Scampton. In fact they delayed their departure slightly, and by the time they appeared only slightly later than planned the rain had stopped, the blue skies reappeared, and the conditions were just perfect for a really special display.

Harrier - Southend 2006

I won't get on to the ridiculousness of the government's decision to scrap these incredible planes - aside from to say it's a travesty. I will say that I saw this display many times at airshows, and I never failed to see it bring a smile to the face of all those who witnessed it's "bow" before departing at the end, and never failed to see at least one small child scream and cover their ears as it came down low at crowd centre in an awesome (and very noisy!) hover. For that memory alone, Harrier, I thank you...

This is The Blades. We saw their first ever public display in 2006, have seen them numerous times since, and they're still super-impressive now. I like this photo on a lot of levels - once again it shows the advantage of the fantastic viewpoint at Dartmouth, it also shows the brilliant paint-scheme on the team's Extra 300 planes. Possibly the only aerobatic team I've seen that can display after the Red Arrows and still look good - but then as they're all ex RAFAT pilots maybe that's not so surprising?

Robyn

Waiting for news...

It's an exciting day today in the world of Red....and Blue, in fact! Today is the day that the Red Arrows find out who will be flying in which position for the 2014 display season, and at the same time their support/engineering chaps - known as the "Blues" due to the distinctive royal blue flying suits they wear during the season - will hear which of them have been assigned to the prestigious "circus" positions. "Circus" is the name given to the chaps who each have a specific plane/pilot to take care of - they fly in the hawks to and from the display sites (although not during the actual displays, they do take part in flypasts if these are conducted as part of transit rather than as specific events).

We know that these two chaps...

Synchro pair 2012

Ben Plank & Chris Lyndon-Smith - flying as the Synchro pair, Red 6 & 7 - seen here flying at Dartmouth Regatta last year, will be departing for pastures new - Planky's done rather well having had 4 years flying with the team, and seems hotly tipped to make a return in the future as Red 1 too. Pilots usually fly with the Reds for 3 years, so each year sees 3 new pilots come onto the team, however difficult circumstances over the past few years have dictated that the regular pattern has been broken. This year will see just 2 new arrivals from the shortlist of 6 that went forward earlier in the year during Excercise Springhawk - they will fly in the front half of the team - Reds 1 - 5. It's likely that one of the 2nd year pilots will move to Red 7, Synchro 2, with this year's Red 7, James McMillan - moving forward one space to become Synchro Leader.

Red 7 2013

With the exception of Red 1 - "The Boss" - who stays in his position for his three years with the team (and will also have flown with them earlier in his career also) everyone else finds out today which role they will be performing next year, and the 2 new pilots will also be announced to the public. The news is likely to be broken first on the Reds own website and I will edit this post later on to include the new lineup once the press release appears. You can also follow several of the chaps on Twitter - Red 4, Martin Pert, was tweeting the other night about a likely change in his Twitter name!

Is anyone else waiting for news today?

Robyn

And in the nick of time...

Well if you read SFT's blog yesterday I bet you can already guess where MrEH & I spent Sunday afternoon! Yes, in a slightly damp field near Duxford, that's where! We're not all that far from Duxford - about 30 miles and it's a straight journey up the motorway so we do try to head that way for their big airshows when we can. We'd missed the Spring show this year, so when we heard that displays for the Autumn show included the Red Arrows and Battle of Britain Memorial flight we were determined to go.

Now I have to make a small confession here - and admit that we have never EVER paid to go into a Duxford airshow. Along with a small crowd of others, instead we head to a field about a mile away from the end of the runway and watch from there - in aircraft terms a mile on the ground is next to nothing, and apart from the very small planes pretty much everything that displays comes directly over our heads at some stage...including these...

- that turns out to be Red 7 - James McMillan, identified with some help on Twitter from Red 4.

We arrived at Duxford just ahead of the Battle Of Britain Memorial Flight's planned display time - and instantly found ourselves huddled under an umbrella in POURING rain. Not ideal, and having driven through broadly similar weather on the way up, we did briefly wonder whether we were wasting our time. Thankfully the rain stopped, and clouds lifted, and the BBMF - who'd clearly been waiting for a break - flew in. Great to see them as always - although due to the delay in them appearing their display was curtailed somewhat - something that Spitfire Pilot Andrew Millican was clearly not best pleased about judging by his later comments. Shortly after another big warbird - B17 Bomber Sally-B - a regular at this show and always great to see. I got some more decent photos of her too as the light had improved a bit.

I was very keenly looking forward to seeing the French equivalent of the Red Arrows - Patrouille De France - the first time I've seen them display and we weren't disappointed. They fly an 8-ship formation, and it must be said that their red/white/blue painted Alpha jets are nothing like as eye catching as the Reds Hawks. Some of the formations flown are similar to those we're used to, while others, like this...

...are those that make them stand out as "something different". We commented that their precision did not seem to be quite as marked as we'd expect, and although initially I wasn't sure that this was the case, seeing RAFAT display very soon afterwards proved this to be the case. They make far more use of the smoke trails than our chaps do - the Reds have quite limited amounts of smoke with each Hawk carrying dye enough for 5 minutes of white smoke and a minute each of red & blue, as a result they have to be extremely precise about switching on, and off. Several times during the PdF display MrEH noted that a lone jet was still trailing smoke some time after it appeared that it should have been shut off. Regardless however, they put on an excellent show, and it was a pleasure to watch another of the world's military aerobatic teams in action.

The light began falling away at this point so we contented ourselves with drinking tea from the flask (well of course!) and eating Jammie Dodgers while various planes some of which I recognised, some of which I didn't, flew overhead. The SIX Spitfires roaring in overhead was quite something to see, and hear, Duxford loves its WWII planes and you can always guarantee plenty of Spitfires, Hurricanes and similar. Then the rain started falling - looking across the countryside we could see it was going to be heavy so we grabbed everything and made a dash for the car - made it just in time as the heavens opened! There was only about half an hour to go before the Red Arrows were due to leave Scampton and a lot of folk clearly decided that there was no way their show was going to go ahead - we, being the stubborn types we are (and having a flask that still had tea in it...) stuck it out though. Gradually the rain stopped, and it started brightening a little...take-off time from Scampton came and went with no news on Twitter, which we took to be a good thing, and eventually, in the nick of time, the sun broke through!

...Better than that, the weather conditions meant that the light was absolutely fantastic and the smoke trails more spectacular even than usual...

The show itself was another cracker - with the flat open countryside all around you can see the formation approaching from a good way out, and there's nothing to block your view of the run-ins so you get plenty of warning of each manoeuvre and (in theory, anyway!) time to set up for it. I got my wished for shot of the 5/4 split...

...and a different angle of one of the breaks with spectacular smoke trails...

Finally, at the end of the display the guys formed up for a final fly-through - on went the smoke...

What a fantastic final view of the team for 2013! 

Robyn

At the going down of the sun....

In spite of it being fairly close to us, we'd never before been to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. When we realised a while ago that the admission could be paid for using ClubCard Deals vouchers we decided that it would make a good frugal day out, and chose today as our day to visit based on all the exhibits being open as it is remembrance Sunday. (The majority of the time through the winter some areas are closed off - the admission fee drops slightly to take account of this). To our surprise on arriving we were told that admission today was free, so the vouchers have gone back on the shelf for use elsewhere! The museum was holding its own remembrance service which we attended, and the shot above was taken as we left the building afterwards.

I'm currently taking part in a photographic challenge on an online community I'm a member of - it was borne from a number of people complaining that they didn't use their cameras enough, something which I really identified with, so I suggested that we got together and made a concerted effort to put that right. From a personal perspective I should probably use it as an incentive to post here more often - oddly enough it isn't a problem when we're in the hebrides, but once back in real life any number of lame excuses can come along and stand in the way of me simply taking, processing and posting a shot. Annoying, isn't it!

Robyn