I'm sitting outside for my early morning tea this morning. The first time this year and the first time in our new garden furniture and on our new garden seating area.

I've just looked in the clear blue sky and there are south and eastbound con trails all over, whilst at a mid level there are planes climbing away, heading south out of Speke and Ringway. Liverpool and Manchester Airports. At a lower level we also get regular visits from the blue and yellow helicopters of the RAF's helicopter pilot school at RAF Shawbury. None of it intrusive but as an ex aircraft spotter it keeps me interested.

But it got me thinking.

For the first 20 years of our married life we lived in Bovingdon, which had one of the beacons that was an entry point to the London Control Zone, around which a 'stack' of planes bound for Heathrow would queue up in a spiral in the sky.

Then we moved to a village five miles north of Harrogate and found ourselves in a Low Flying Area used by the RAF and other air forces to transit across country on their way to play among the hills of the Lake District etc. You never really get used to the sledgehammer roar of a Tornado at a few hundred feet flying over at random intervals. Not just Tornados though, we had Harriers, Hawks, F15s etc. We even had a regular Humphrey the Hercules bumble over every Thursday night at about 10pm and bumble back again about 30 minutes later. I reckon he'd been out for some fish and chips.

All this aerial activity makes me wonder if there's anywhere you can escape it, or has my early 'spotter' status just made me especially aware?

Hercules, Chinooks, Biplane squadron, Police Choppers, Apaches - pretty quiet really

I forgot to mention that when we were in North Yorks we were near RAF Dishforth when it was an Apache helicopter base and we had them stoogeing around the area all day.

We've got gliders they're nice and quiet

Denise & Phil

Just before we left North Yorkshire I used to regularly see a n RAF Boeing Sentry AWACS aircraft way up in the sky describing a very, very wide circle at probably 35,000ft. My reckoning was that the southerly tip of the circle was just north of us, say, Thirsk way and the northerly point probably over Newcastle. It used to stay up there for hours, going slowly round it's circuit, presumably crew training. You could see the big radar boom on it's back with the naked eye at times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPhpxOFyLCY

Quote: Pepé Le Pew wrote in post #5

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While it's not quite as exciting as the Mach Loop, we get some quite neat stuff round The Malverns, and a fair amount of it flies below the level of our gaff across the prairie to the north.

The highlight, by far, was the day two B52s had what we reckoned was an aborted mission to the first Gulf War.

They spent hours and hours describing massive circuits out to the west of us, and they came reasonably close on each lap - close enough to see that they were fully bombed-up. Like fully bombed up.

All the under-wing pylons had huge clusters of conventional ordnance, and as they laboured across the cloudless sky again and again and again you could make out the contents of the bomb bays through doors that were hanging open.

Everything that could be opened or lowered was opened or lowered - the bay doors, full flaps, undercarriage - the whole shooting match, all in an effort to produce as much drag as possible to burn off the fuel as quickly as possible before returning to Fairford. It must have been as noisy as hell in there.

And even then it took them a good part of the day to do it.


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Yes, that is my roof and gutter - and this is a bungalow!

That looks like an Airbus A400M to me. I saw one flying low just outside Ludlow last summer, it was heading west into the Welsh hills.

When we were dog showing we stayed at the Highland Showground three times. It's just west of Edinburgh, right next door to Ingliston (Edinburgh Airport). You could take a similar pic there.