Originally Posted by Malaysian28
In order to film such aerial combats, wouldnt large areas of airspace need to be cornered off, so if it was filmed over the South Coast of England would airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick, Bournemouth, Southampton, etc be affected ?
I looked on Wikipedia and stated a few aerial shots where over rural Spain but most where over Southern England.
IIRC, for the UK filming, two main controlled airspace areas were set aside, a small one being for some of the white cliffs and over the channel for the shots out of Hawkinge, but the main area was actually in Cambidgeshire, hence the main base of ops being Duxford. I believe at least one RAF Canberra crew got a shock when they strayed into the NOTAM area and came out of cloud into the middle of a gaggle of 109’s
So, not really the south of England in the traditional sense, and therefore didn’t interfere with Heathrow, Gatwick etc at all.
The three airfields used were Duxford, North Weald and the sadly now gone Hawkinge which still was pretty much as it had been during 1940 having never had tarmac runways constructed.
The summer of 1968 in the UK was bad weather wise and so to get he filming in the can in time, one or maybe a couple (can’t remember exactly) of the Spits were ferried to Spain to enable the aerial filming to be completed.