Royal International Air Tattoo 2023 General Discussion Thread

[Rob666]

Well let's hope when they are called on it's not windy!

[Nighthawke]

Pleasure vs. war - big difference!

[James Cutting]

Oh dear, knew it would be commented soon. Amazed we didn't get it with the rain yesterday!

Just like why the F-35 flew off early - Got buffeted by wind and thought "I'm off". A lot of the displays today have had a real challenge in the wind, so no surprise they aren't going to risk it.

[Rob666]

Just saying

[Rob666]

RAF short of fuel, quick Typhoon display. Has the RDAF 16, cancelled due to previously mentioned tech issue?

[cat1]

Any news on the rest of today?

[EAGLE]

Any news on the rest of today?

Apparently, just a single movement left.

17:50 ARRIVAL Fairchild 24 Argus x1 Civilian

[James Cutting]

The Gripen displayed and Al Fursan were due to.

[James Cutting]

Seems the B-52 is broken, too

[Red-Eye-Knight]

Seems the B-52 is broken, too

You couldn't make it up last years B-52 went tech on route to RIAT and this year's B-52 goes tech when at RIAT....Unreal!!!!

[Blackcat1]

C’mon she’s 63! She’s bound to have arthritis !! I’ve got it at 41!! And it’s not pleasant !

[seven]

Seem to work rather well when on deployment over here though...

[Blackcat1]

Seem to work rather well when on deployment over here though...

You get good days , you get bad days

[wessexspotter]

Best announcement of the day was about the school group who were at the police station, asking if the teacher who was supposed to be accompanying them could possibly pop in to collect them...

[reaper493]

Anyone who went today - how was the check in/bag search?

About the same as normal, or did it take much longer?

[Bobby 1211]

Much longer, 45min wait

[raptor9]

I would suggest that the F.35 appeared 'Wobbly' compared to the Harrier, simply because the F.35 is fly-by-wire, therefore computer making constant inputs and corrections to turbulence, whereas the Harrier is manually controlled, and will only react to pilot inputs. Therefore, if said pilot chooses not to alter pitch or roll, it will remain steady!.

[The Cat]

1 minute at 0730 (number 5 in queue) bag searched, body scan front and rear but no ticket scanned !

[POL]

Posted on UKAR earlier, I'll post here too for the record

Back from the show today, a few thoughts before I go and look at my pictures...

Joined the traffic jam to get to the base at 0830. Blue route was carnage, so got shifted on to the green route. Took an hour from Cricklade to being parked up. Could have been worse I suppose!

What was painful was the then 75 minutes from the car park to actually getting onto the base. Plenty of opportunity for people to queue jump, which they were doing because rather than park people front to back, there was three or four different areas all being filled at the same time. What a disaster.

Finally got to the entrance, most unorganised and disinterested ticket scanners I've ever seen. In my queue the guys' scanner ran out of battery so he just walked off, leaving someone else to then scan two queues! Bag search was fine, nothing more than normal in my opinion ("please open your bag, ok, please move your camera so I can see under it, ok go in").

Onto the showground...green area was nice, I liked the German Typhoons and Belgian F-16 behind the KC-30M, that was a very nice idea. A few aircraft still bagged up by the time I got in at 1130, which was a shame. I forgot to photograph them on my way out, oh fudge. "Cold War lineup" was perfect in terms of positioning with the light, happy with that!

Flying display aircraft parked at that end were a bit odd, quite distant from the barriers (I understand why) but last year it was far better to have more things there and less on the north side.

Moving down the airfield, USAF B-52, MC-130 and CV-22 were almost impossible to photograph because the USAF had moved the barriers, but of course that's their prerogative and the families were loving getting on board the SOG assets.

Italian area was really nice to have everything together, not sure why they were mixed up in the way they were though? Not in any sort of chronological order, just fast-jet, historic, fast-jet, historic jet, etc. Maybe one for the next big anniversary? The A-200 behind the KC-767 didn't really work here, sadly.

By this point the showground is BUSY. The queues for the toilets were huge, water stations were overrun and the food areas? Snaking well out into the areas around aircraft. I overheard one guy say it took him 45 minutes to get to the front of the food queue!

I'm fairly sure this is the busiest Saturday I've ever seen at Fairford, the whole airfield was RAMMED. You could barely move around the crowdline at Green, and that's usually empty!

Back to the aircraft, the positioning of everything down the middle of the taxiway was really nice, no random direction changes (some facing north, the next group south, etc. like last year) which made life a bit easier. Moving the traders south of the aircraft was really refreshing, and meant you could see the runway from basically the middle of the Blue Zone all the way along! Really nice, hopefully it stays that way.

Typical disinterested Typhoon groundcrews, apparently that's a mandatory approach for them. F-35 crews really keen to talk though - even though they had to stand the other side of an extra barrier to do so

More people. So many more people. Got really difficult to walk past the end of the RAF stuff here and down towards the Red crowdline, but got there just in time for the heavens to open! Nice to see lots of people didn't bother looking at the forecast and slowly trudging out in t-shirts and shorts. Honorary mention again to the fact that the toilet queues were massive.

Reached the ME262 just in time to see them put the covers on it and walk off...so no photo there! oh fudge.

Damp walk back to the bus stop, which felt like it was basically at the end of Blue/Red Zones rather than nearer red entrance this year, and back in a lovely cool bus to the Green Zone and back to the car.

£72.50, it's a lot of money, I said I wasn't going to go again this year but as always, Air Ops pull something out of the bag. It'll never be a perfect event, but I think they did well this year. Well done all.

P.S. I'm sunburnt. I packed for heavy rain, not sun!

[81TFW]

Anyone who went today - how was the check in/bag search?

About the same as normal, or did it take much longer?

Joined the queue for Blue zone security at 0734, got onto the showground at 0806. (I deliberately timed it.) Other queues were moving faster, though, so I don't know if our bag checker was being more thorough/pedantic or we were just unlucky.