Originally Posted by
FarWest
We used to contract Concorde to fly large supersonic figures of 8 over the north sea and used Lightnings and F4s to fly practice intercepts against Concorde.
Allegedly a Lightning flown by D*** G****** overtook the Concorde and barrel-rolled around it. The Concorde crew were not impressed.
FW
I am wondering if that is the D*** G****** that I knew some considerable time back in RAFG
It was standard practice in the 70's for civil aircraft to be used for Practice Intercepts (as said in an earlier post the civil aircraft could put /EMBELLISH in the RMK/ field of the flight plan to 'volunteer') but usually the intercepts were radar intercepts and the civil aircraft crew and pax would be unaware of being used as a target as the intercept was broken off well before visual range - though sometimes less successfully with head on PIs
. However,
the entire attitude then was different to these operations and there was often exchanges of repartee between civil crew and Eastern Radar in particular. Crews both civil and military seemed to actually enjoy what they were doing back then.
ATC Watcher
Intercepting Concorde a M2.0 at FL600 ? Good luck with that one .
If it was a Lightning intercept it would have to be in the close to the UK coast due to their limited range. Concorde was not allowed to accelerate to supersonic until clear of land so a Lightning would have no problem 'keeping up'. From very early in the
Lightning existence back in the 1960's it was used for PIs up to 65,000ft with PIs against U2's