Big increase in military flights

Great minds!

AF1 probably has better fuel economy than The Beast and entourage of Suburbans. Also, those Secret Service agents would get really tired running beside it al the way from Suffolk to Newquay.

those Secret Service agents would get really tired running beside it al the way from Suffolk to Newquay

🙂

I’m surprised that they haven’t given the agents those jet packs so that they can run alongside AF1 too.

Couple of Typhoons from RAF Coningsby flying circuits just north of St Ives yesterday evening for a good few hours.

They were there join the day as well.

Red Arrows are down there tomorrow as well. Nothing quite like flying 9 jets trailing coloured smoke over a climate emergency conference… 😉

Euro fighter and tanker back off the coast of Cornwall.

Good time of year for some Arrows spotting! Reds arriving at EGPK yesterday, no display but always put on a run and break and a token smoke on for the locals!

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Spotted this yesterday when I was in Leeds. I heard but didn’t see the ‘escorted pass’ but saw the Typhoon once the light plane had landed. I can only assume it was an exercise as the light plane did laps of the Typhoon’s start point (Scampton??) prior to heading to Leeds Bradford and landing, dunno though. Just goes to show what it takes to track in a Typhoon when the target is only flying 150 kts.

EDIT – not an exercise https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/people/raf-typhoon-fighter-jet-scrambled-to-yorkshire-skies-to-intercept-plane-and-guide-it-to-leeds-bradford-airport-3345099

I saw the wiggly track of that Typhoon yesterday afternoon, but didn’t notice that he was escorting something else, as I’d filtered non-military aircraft out of my selection. My thoughts at the time were basically “Christ, he’ll have made himself proper dizzy weaving around like that” but if it was an exercise to throttle his effective overall groundspeed back to 150 knots or so, that explains it. Good to know we have the Quick Reaction Alert force available and scrambled when something raises suspicions, even if, presumablyas in this case, it’s just a perfectly innocent radio comms failure.

C-17 Globemaster has been practicing ‘stuff’ around the Midlands

That rattles our windows occasionally of an evening. The gargantuan airborne slug of oil-belching doom.

Where can you track military flights, if you can? Was in Aberporth this week, two late nights in a row there was a big helicopter mooching around very low, nav lights on but nothing else showing, not visible on flightaware.

tar adsb
Click the U up the top to only show military flights. It wont show all depending on whether they switch on the beacon or not.

Brillo, ta! 🙂

Someone’s out having fun in a Hurricane over Dartford just now. Been in the air for a while and got about a it, as it looks like they started over Lincon way

Spitfire out over Oxford too

Amazing seeing all the military transporters/passenger planes in and out of Afghanistan the past week and still today seeing them flying in and out of the surrounding countries.

Couple of Canadian F18 Hornets doing a run and break at Prestwick this afternoon. Beautiful looking planes, and proper noisy!

Saw some ninjas** on ADSB heading out of Mildenhall one night last week, went down through France not sure where via but I can guess where they end up.

** 2 x MC130 in formation 19000 ft + 19050ft, and an Osprey some way in front. The Osprey was following the A26 motorway like some sort of Sunday chopper pilot.

Not a military flight, but quite late the other evening I could hear a low-flying helicopter stooging around where I live, which isn’t that unusual; the local air ambulance does get called out sometimes, and the police chopper as well, on rare occasions, used to be quite common, until the government decided that Wiltshire wasn’t allowed to have one any more, and gave it to Bristol, which meant the loss of the air ambulance as well, so fundraising got one back. Anyway, I checked online and it was the North Wales Air Support chopper, which had flown from St Athan, near Cardiff. It flew an odd track, too, so I can only think there was some training going on.

This is the outward flight, it stopped and circled over Burnham-on-Sea, then flew on to Chippenham, where it spent quite some time, before flying straight back to St Athan.

It also circled over Biddestone as well – just struck me as odd that a North Wales police chopper, flying from South Wales, should come all the way over here, to circle around before flying back.
Oh, I changed the background colour partway through by accident, trying out different settings.

Couple of Canadian F18 Hornets doing a run and break at Prestwick this afternoon. Beautiful looking planes, and proper noisy!

I may have seen these head down Loch Ness (NE to SW).

2 pairs a minute apart

Spitfire doing laps in Stirling today. Brill to see and hear

Was watching a flight of 14 C130’s all in line in America but all of them have now disappeared from the tracker.

B52 over England. I’m guessing heading to Fairford

B52 over England. I’m guessing heading to Fairford

There are two more in UK airspace, one heading from NW toward Lake District and one playing around near Mull

Oh yeah. Didn’t see those

BOEING E-3 Sentry is aways doing donuts just off the north sea daft question but how far can it “see” or is it sub hunting? Or they have put it on auto pilot and listeing to podcasts or cabin pressure.

BOEING E-3 Sentry is aways doing donuts just off the north sea daft question but how far can it “see” or is it sub hunting?

Ruskie’s were playing off the Irish coast last week IIRC. Monitoring the return of the fleet?

Sentrys aren’t sub-hunters, keep an eye on the P-8 Poseidons for that

Anyone know what goes on near Studland with RAF transports whizzing round and around? @danstw maybe?

I’ve noticed that transports can spend hours doing low, tight circuits over the sea – just like this Herc is about to I’m guessing.

Is it some sort of waterbourne practice for the Marines or SBS?

Whatever it is, it seems to involve a lot of flying over a small stretch of sea.

Might be airdrops of rafts.

Anyone know what goes on near Studland

They’re monitoring the Japanese fleet who are about to attack Poole Harbour…
IGMC

Just over a week ago there was some activity fairly high up over Westbury, so I checked ADSB and it was an F-15 Eagle out of Lakenheath, at 23,000ft, heading out over the Bristol Channel, where it stooged around for a bit off the North Devon coast before heading back.
Then, later on, I could hear deep rumbling from a jet at high altitude again, which seemed to go on for ages, so I did a quick check, and got this:

The fact that I was in Westbury, Wiltshire, and I could hear them while they were off the Cornish coast, 113 miles away, was rather impressive. There were three of them, though…

Regarding the Buffs at Fairford, on the BBC’s Points West news this evening all four are at Fairford. A spokesman was fairly non-committal about why they’re there, something something excercises something…

I was just having a quick look at ADSB, just to see if there was anything about, and I noticed an A400 Atlas just approaching Brize, so I expanded the window to see where it had been, and I was rather surprised to see it had come from what appears to be desert to the south-west of Algier, somewhere called Tiaret.

That’s probably when it switched on it’s tracking, you can tell by the colour of the line that it was at about 30000 feet there

Is it some sort of waterbourne practice for the Marines or SBS?

It is exactly that. Used to watch them from the Bournemouth side of the bay doing drops. SBS based in Poole

Apparently 4 long range B-52 Stratofortress bombers arrived today at RAF Fairford

Whilst looking on here I remembered that I took a screen grab of Flight Radar on 28th April 2020. This was all flights at that time

Apologies having picture problems

Link hopefully

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dyna-ti
Free Member

Apparently 4 long range B-52 Stratofortress bombers arrived today at RAF Fairford

Yup, normal posturing stuff. Might see B-2s as well with the way things are going

Buff on the tracker:

Linky (if you are quick.)

Is it windy in Fairford? I think it just aborted it’s landing.

I tracked x4 F15’s earlier on heading into the Lakes, then caught them on the Bowness webcam. Proper geek but made me happy.