Very late night flying

[cottesmore09]

Hi all,

Does anyone know the reason why Wattisham and its Apaches are flying at 2:30am in the morning?

Im not one to complain about flying at night as we all understand the training, but 2:30am for half an hour doing low level flying over the house is a quite a silly time to be up and about?

Thanks,

Cott09

[Rerun57]

It may be related to the level of darkness at this time of year and the need, for whatever reason, to be keeping night flying up to standard.

See:

http://astro.ukho.gov.uk/nao/miscellanea/birs2.html

[Richard B]

We had 2 Apache choppers flying around our village of Bulkington Warks up till around 22.00 last night.
seen them going in and out of Bramcote barracks, flying around the local area etc, made a nice sight on such a
nice evening sitting in the garden.

[gary1701]

Hi,

They've been flying late all week. It's fairly common for Wattisham Apaches to be operating well after midnight at this time of year, although 2:30 AM seems a little late, even for them. I'm normally the last one to complain but one night this week there was one on the circuit for over half an hour gone midnight which probably did not go down very well with the locals.

I suspect part of the problem is the lack of serviceable aircraft that are available, as the same few aircraft are just turned around after each flight, rather than having more sorties at the same time. As they're currently in the process of mothballing 20 to 25% of the AH fleet then the situation probably isn't going to get any better, although they will have two less squadrons to train.

Gary

[SCARECROW]

Same as us at Shawbury, its still quite light night flying wise so the training needs to be carried out when its as dark as possible.