I used to remember watching from the bottom of my garden in Minehead trio's of F-111's from Alconbury and Lakenheath noisily circling over the Bristol Channel in the eighties, carrying out dummy bombing practice runs low over the water near Brean Down, great noise!! We used to have a lot of low flying by all sorts of aircraft and Concord test flights too Happy days, deathly quiet now :(

Perhaps in a hundred years, a descendant of David Cundall will pack up in Burma and start digging in Oz, but at least he'll probably find them :)

Rather sad videos here showing the fate of most of the RAAF fleet :sad:

I understand the Cold Soak Facility at Filton was also dismantled and taken to Australia to maintain the RAAF fleet after the USAF contract was finished and I guess that's now cut up and on the scrap-heap too.

I've no idea which is the noisiest, but the B58 and latterly the B1 might well run the F111 close on the excess decibel score.



SHJ

You're obviously too young to have heard an F100 engaging its afterburner.
We had a couple based at Farnborough after Experimental Flying Wing moved to Boscombe (they needed an airfield with arrestor gear) and when the tower controller heard one engage the 'burner during engine ground runs, he thought it had blown up and pressed the crash alarm! I'd heard them many times before at air displays.

My dad, Andy Jones, used to work on these at that time. He unfortunately passed away very young, but I would love to hear any stories

For the uninitiated, the F100 is a Pratt & Whitney engine used on F-15s and F-16s. Loud, but not as loud as some of the older engines.

Ahhhhhh I had immediately thought of the F-100 Super Sabre, which wasn't overly noisy from my memory of air displays in the late 1960's.
The f100 engine makes a lot more sense when talking about raw noise

Yes: F-100 (with a dash) Super Sabre noisy too, powered by a J57 (no dash) engine.

For me it's the U-2 and the A-6: SR-71 gets mentioned as does B-1, but I still think the U-2 beats them all for noise.

It's that HUGE bang when it lights the 'burner.

Super Sabres used to fly from Hurn (BOH) in the '80s. The doors and windows in hanger 600 (Glos Air) used to rattle when they took off.

These were the ones from Hurn; they moved to Farnborough after MOD experimental flying moved out because we still had arrestor barriers and cables which Hurn didn't.

There was a F100 display at Oshkosh a couple of years ago - that was very noisy but impressive.

What aircraft was it powering ?

:O

If memory serves from airshows back in the 70's, most of the USAF metal was damned noisy, F-4's, 100's, 104's, 105's, B-58's, SR-71's and a few more besides.

An F-16 maybe?

Just out of interest, but I was outside my house in the Algarve in the 80s when a gaggle of F-111s came over very fast and very low. This was just after they had bombed Tripoli so I wondered if it was an aborted second go. Politics avoided flying over France or Spain and they were cutting the corner of S. Portugal, who were more friendly...Must have had flight refueling at that range. Never heard anything about it in the news.
DW
Oh, friend was peddling around in the Faro club C150 and was told to get lost over the sea for a bit. He got a nice view of Concorde landing on a publicity jolly. Felt quite good being No.2 to that one.

And while I am at it, there was an amazing air show at Faro in 1980. They cleared all the junk up, like the odd bent DC3 and a couple of Super Constellations that had run arms to Biafra and Invited all. My first close look at an F 15 (guard menaced me with his gun) and a couple of F 111s doing after burner low runs right over the crowd. The Gib lot sent over two Lighnings. One went u/s, but the other did a fine display. They announced a Blackburn Buccaneer and we looked up. Nothing.. he came in over the lagoon at 100 odd feet and bent our ears a bit. Lots more with dancing helios and other stuff. Much of which one cannot do now... For good reason...

I was referring to the F100 aircraft not the engine (or the airliner for that matter)https://www.pprune.org/images/icons/46.gif

A good example of the difference a hyphen makes. Present-day US military aircraft designations always have one, their engines never do. :O