"Nothing but the rain"
Just browsing my favourite aircraft tracking website and decided you should know that air-to-air refuelling gets practised off the Norfolk coast. See this Voyager aircraft enjoying the baking weather in this country.
The green box is the area they are allowed to practise. The red planes are military planes, not all of them, but those transmitting ADS-B. I would expect that some Typhoons are over the sea taking on fuel from the Voyager.
I’ve written here quite a bit about ADS-B and stuff along with tracking aircraft and multi-lateration. Well, I was looking at the aircraft tracking website 360 Radar this evening and spotted an amusing thing.
The route shown on the picture is that taken by an RAF Voyager aircraft over the North Sea. The plane took off from RAF Brize Norton and headed out over the Scottish area of the North Sea. The green area is rain and the purple highlights are RAF airfields along with the blue highlights showing civilian airports. What particularly struck me about this picture was the almost-penis drawn as the second area of activity. I think they should have tried a little harder [but would probably get “moved” assignment].
Let’s put this thing into some perspective by adding recognised Danger Areas in red and refuelling training areas in green.
Now we can see that the Voyager has maneuvered beautifully through the danger areas and maintained some lovely flight paths in the AAR areas. The plane is currently at 16,000ft and moving at 330 kts. Pretty standard stuff.
It’s amazing to see that this is practiced and practiced to make sure that when it comes to doing this in a real theatre everyone knows exactly what they are doing and it all goes to plan.