This is, I think, the collection I am proudest of. I have some AviationTags which are actual parts of aircraft skin that have been cut up to look pretty and be luggage tags so you can spot your suitcase on the carousel. I’m not going to use these as tags. They are going to stay in the display cabinet because I think they are pretty and I don’t want them ruined.
The first tag I got was the P180. They used to fly over my house a lot pre-Brexit. There were people who would fly from Biggin Hill to Frankfurt and the gorgeous sound of these planes would draw me out of the house or workplace. They are very good looking planes. The aircraft registration of this one was D-IZZY and I have sat in their sister D-IPPY. The next skin I bought was the Super Guppy, such an iconic aircraft. Then came my fafourite:
The SU35S. This is part of a Russian plane that was shot down over Ukraine as part of the war there. A company in Kiev managed to get some of the skin and create these tags. While it was expensive it was worth every penny as the profits have been used to help fund the land war. It’s pretty cool to own part of a Sukhoi.
Actual Aircraft Skins
The last piece of skin I purchased was the A320. I bought this at Hannover airport as part of the return journey from the M’era Luna festival of 2023. The aircraft that flew me out and returned was an A320 so it seemed appropriate.
These two gorgeous little things are compressor blades from a Rolls Royce RB199 engine. These engines powered the Panavia Tornado and it’s an iconic aircraft still currently in use with two air forces around the world, but not the RAF. The large blade is the first of the compressors and it is wood mounted. The little blade is slightly further along towards the combustion end of the engine and has a little hole as it’s a keyring. Do NOT put the little blade in your pocket. It is sharp and will ruin any clothes that you have.
I think the first part of getting this collection was having the chair and seeing someone else hang their aircraft things on their own chair. It seemed a good place for them. So, I have the following on my Secret Lab chair and I think they look rather smart. No, I don’t care what you think.
Last weekend the Lord Mayor of London had a show, much like the Lord Mayor has a show every year. I wasn’t aware of it as I just happened to glance at 360Radar and see an A400 flying low over the City. A couple of messages later and I learn it’s to start the show. I have never seen the show, even when I could have been part of it. The A400 then turned east and stayed low to avoid all that traffic heading into Heathrow. It flew about three miles from my house and I managed to snap a little picture of it.
I went to RAF Fairford a short while ago to attend the Royal International Air Tattoo. RIAT is a huge airshow which takes place each year at RAF Fairford. I’d never been to this particular airshow before and so I was quite excited. There were also a few aircraft types I had never seen static or flying before:
F35
Su-27
P8
F18 (a friend told me I had seen some at RAF Waddington years ago)
Patrouille de France
Freece Tricolori
Nearly all the other types of aircraft I had seen static or flying before. I have to say now that the very best displays were the F16s and F18. They were both incredibly impressive given how old their design is. The Flanker was amazing, utterly brilliant.
Here is a selection of some of the photographs I had once I’d returned home. Not all the credit goes to me, the kids took quite a few of the photos and did a good job.
Spanish Harrier
Freece Tricolori
NATO Elephant Walk
Breitling Jets
Patrouille de France
Flanker Landing
A Moody Red Arrows Shot
Min Radius Turn F-16
Flanker
Freece Tricolori
Double Concorde
The weather was a little cloudy at times but we coped. Photographs look better with a mixture of blue sky and fluffy Simpsons clouds.
The noise was amazing and I just loved the sound of the afterburning jets taking off and pulling many G to show off their capabilities. I also met some old friends while at the tattoo and it was lovely to arrange to meet them. I even managed to bump into George who is a colleague from the PAC at Amport, I knew he attended and I was hoping to see him.
I’m not too happy with the media page for the photos as I think the photo is too small on that, so the images link to the actual image file, I might get around to learning how to adjust that one day.
A few summers ago my project was to build an ADS-B receiver and use the data collected to upload to an aircraft tracking website. If you want to see what I see then go to:
I don’t remember the details about how I found this but the project was good fun and I got the Raspberry Pi in the loft with a decent aerial, filter and pre-amp, and it was all working fine. I was using a lovely piece of software called Virtual Radar Server and was able to use this as a web server and people could see the aircraft on web pages served by the Pi.
360 Radar is good because it using multi-lateration to detect the positions on military aircraft. This is pretty handy for spotters like me and it also works well when I take cadets to RAF Wittering for some Air Experience Flying, I can see where my cadets are in the air.
Over the last few months I’d been receiving outage warnings from the 360 guys. It would appear that my Pi had stopped sending them data and while I live in a flight-busy area of the country and there’s plenty of contributors here every little helps. I had the occasional outage and this seemed to be when the router reset and the Pi wouldn’t re-find the existing wi-fi network. I just had to power cycle the Pi and everything worked fine. The outages seemed to be occurring more over the last while with the Pi stopping feeding every few days.
At first I thought it was a wi-fi issue so I bought some new ethernet-over-power adapters and linked the system into the route via a wired connection. This also meant I could ssh in to the Pi even if wifi was the original problem. I tried to work out how to turn the wifi connection off entirely but just ended up changing the SSID the Pi looked for as a simle way of ensuring the wired connection took preference.
After a week of testing I was still getting outages and my initial thought was that the VRS software was making the Pi work too much. I’m not sure why I thought that but I looked up ways to remove VRS. This was not the easiest as I had installed it years ago and couldn’t remember how it ran within the OS. I eventually managed to remove the Mono service and this stopped VRS running.
It was at this point I worked out how to use the log file of the MLAT client and I could see that all the software seemed to be working fine it was the Dump1090 program that didn’t seem to be sending data internally. I figured that Dump1090 had somehow stopped receiving the signal from the aerial. It all worked fine after a reboot and so I decided to replace the USB dongle that was decoding the ADS-B signals. I ordered a FlightAware USB stick and at the same time decided I would rebuild the Pi OS from scratch to have a “clean” build.
Once the new USB stick arrived I turned off all the systems and followed the excellent instructions from the 360 Radar guys to rebuild the OS of the Pi and just run a lite version of what I had been doing before. This took a while as I mistakenly thought the Pi wasn’t uploading to 360 because I was looking at the wrong server details. After an email to the support chaps it turned out I was contributing and a couple of hours of troubleshooting by me hadn’t been worth it!
So, the Pi sits in the loft, chugging away supplying data to 360 Radar, in return for which I get free access to their excellent tracking site. I’m running dump1090-mutability along with the MLAT-Client from 360. I’d really like to be able to allow you all to see the output of this but Mutability doesn’t have an external feed and I am not opening up my 80 port for the world.
As part of my trip around Lincolnshire I spent a few hours outside Coningsby watching the Typhoons. They are pretty loud when taking off although one did set my car alarm off by doing a full-afterburner take off and heading straight up to 15,000 feet.
Eurofighter Typhoon
I also went to the BBMF hangar and looked around the various types they have there. Here’s their Lancaster:
Avro Lancaster PA474
I also saw another Lancaster at ex RAF East Kirkby.
Just Jane – Avro Lancaster
However, the main reason for being a hundred and sixty miles from home was to be relatively close to RAF Marham so I could try and see some Tornados flying before they end their airborne days. I had noticed there was a NOTAM out for Marham on the Friday and so I planned to be there about half an hour before the start of whatever it was. I figured that if it wasn’t the Tornados it would be a Lightning II and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing to see. I still haven’t seen one fly and I could only just make out two in real life over the other side of the airfield.
Sortie – Rolling
I was lucky. There were five Tornados going up and preparing for a final display and fly past later in the month. It was really good to see them taxiing.
Tonka Formation – RAF Marham
After about an hour over the North Sea doing their stuff they headed back to Marham but not before I had seen four F15s fly over and then three KC-135s in formation. They were a sight to see!
So I have two Tornado stories for you. The first was at North Weald airshow in the late 80s. My friend Nick and I had cycled from home and couldn’t afford entry so we just parked our bikes inside one of two fences in line with the end of the runway. We figured we weren’t airside and neither were we next to the road, we were in a kind of no-mans land. A Tornado lined up in front of us and then used full re-heat to take off. The noise and vibration was amazing. It was an awesome sight.
Just A Few Flights Left
My next anecdote involves me being a cadet at RAF Coningsby in 1988. I was allowed to sit in the cockpit of a Tornado ADV and I played with the throttle. I was later told that doing this had dumped some fuel in the engine, but I wasn’t concerned. Later that night I was on the flight line “helping” and the aircraft I had been sitting in refused to start. It looks like I broke it [a little].
Head On – Panavia Tornado
While at Marham the spotters got our own little airshow and it was such a delight. It was a special time to see these aircraft doing what they were meant to do, which is fly, for the last time.
I should add in that while in Cyprus on cadet camp there were Typhoons and Tornados taking off every evening to bomb ISIS in Syria and Iraq and I remember watching them leave while we were at the beach bar on Akrotiri. The after burners, the noise and the sight was spectacular. Tornados going to do the job they were designed for.
A few weeks ago when I was in the Lake District I would occasionally look at 360Radar to see what was flying close by. I found it curious that there was quite a lack of aircraft flying compared to Kent, where I live normally. Now, the south east does have the three London main airports and most air traffic heading to the continent. Have a look at the two following views and decide for yourself. Both are the same area of land and they are taken within a minute of each other. I think the difference is striking.
Lake District Air Traffic
Kent Air Traffic
Of course, this communication could be entitled:
There’s a lot more planes where there’s a lot more airports
This place was heading east early one morning [probably to Frankfurt] and the colour of the sky and the line of the contrails caught my eye. It looked lovely.
Wokka Over Maidstone
Then there was this Chinook. It passed right over my work place and was such a lovely sight and sound. It amazes me just how technologically amazing we are as a species. Now although I know how these things work it does seem like magic at times!
Spitfire
Finally, yesterday this Spitfire flew over my village. I keep trying to remind people that one day they will be gone and we won’t see them flying anymore. It’s a lesson I have learnt from seeing many planes in the 80s at various airshows without really appreciating just how special they all were.
While visiting Lincolnshire it’s hard to avoid RAF bases and do some aircraft observation. So I spent some time at RAF Coningsby, one of three fighter bases, hosting squadrons of Typhoons. I also visited the air museum at Newark, which I had driven past a few times before but never stopped at. Here’s a selection of the best photos for you.
Typhoon Coningsby
Typhoons Coningsby
Display Typhoon
Display Typhoon
Display Typhoon Going To Bed
Fairey Gannet
Mig 27
Saab Viggen
Avro Shackleton
Phantom Cockpit
Shackleton Cockpit
Vulcan Nav Unit
Before this weekend I had seen Typhoons just twice before. Once at RAF Marham performing a touch and go and once at a Duxford air show. The noise was marvellous.
The name of this communication represents the fact that both Coningsby and Newark are 53.08 degrees north and pretty much forty kilometres apart.
