B52s over Cambridgeshire ?
 

There are several (6?) at Fairford at the mo. I glance at ADSB occasionally during the day and noticed a couple head out to the North Sea to somewhere off Hook of Holland and then back to Fairford. Wish they'd route over South London, years since I saw a Buff in the air.

See 'gloucestershirelive' website (I can't post the URL).

I see them over Banbury most days, east - west direction, ADSB says at about 10/11,000 ft. One had an F15 in close company.

Lovely sights!

Thanks for that TEEJ. Did my heart good to watch that. It brought back many great memories.

Gosh....there I wuz thinking we had gone from mere banter to full blown warfare!

Fascinating to see the wing outrigger wheels trundling along the ground whilst the aircraft is taxying but as the aircraft is making it's take-off run the wheels are well clear of the ground as the wings lift.

IR

Your memory of 1980 Double Top is correct although you forgot to mention that 617 Sqn won every prize but one that year. There was a Double Top in 1981 (trophies shared between 617 and 44), but the last Vulcan GV was 1980.

BB, As ex V-force ground crew I was interested in the time taken to "see off" a B52. It took about 1.5 hours from climb in to taxi out on the V force, how long for a Buff?

The Oberon

Your crew in to t/o time for a Vulcan is a touch pessimistic. For a standard sortie we would crew in 50 minutes to an hour before getting airborne. As to a B-52, I couldn't tell you.

BB. Sorry my mistake, I assumed from your user name and "happy memories" quote that you were ex USAF.

There's one west--bound across the North Sea at the moment, on the present track will be overhead Norwich shortly for anybody up that way who'd like a peek - and if your weather is kind!

Yes, IR, the only one we didn't win was the nav trophy. Very sad to hear that OJ and Duke are no longer with us. The offset choice for the Kielder target was more complicated than you describe, but maybe you know that.

Long ago and far away (in 1962) my family lived on the side of a mountain in West Hartford, Connecticut. Our home's porch overlooked the Connecticut River valley - a spectacular sight, especially in autumn when the entire panorama was ablaze in oranges and reds and yellows of trees stretching their branches and yawning in preparation for their winter's nap. I was thirteen.

Hartford is thirty miles due south of Chicopee, Massachusetts, the home of Westover Air Force Base where a wing (or two?) of B-52H's were based. It is with vivid clarity that I recall the trepidation we felt in October of 1962; the Cuban Missile Crisis! Our home had an actual bomb shelter, stocked to the gills with canned food and supplies, but we all knew that Nikita Khrushchev had East Hartford's Pratt & Whitney on his primary target list. We would be blinded by intense light nanoseconds before we were french fried! - no time to race down to the shelter!

For those few weeks while the world held its breath, the trees didn't seem to mind. They glistened in their long wavelength spectral colors - the ROYG of the rainbow. The air was clear and crisp. Most afternoons, my father and I would sit on the porch and talk and listen and inhale the pure autumn air. Then we would hear "the whine'! 160 TF-33 engines powering twenty Stratofortresses at our eye level, 1,000 feet MSL above their course - the Connecticut River. Five groups of four planes. Fast. Flexing immense muscle. Ready for anything!

My father would put his arm around me and pat my shoulder. He would say: "Son, that's the sound of freedom!" He was right, as usual. I never have understood how that graceful aircraft was labeled with the derogatory moniker Big Ugly Fat F**ker: in flight, the most svelte swan would be hard-pressed to match the BUFF's beauty!
And power....

- Ed

The View From Our Home sans B-52's!

https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....af86f6ba54.jpg

Very impressive departure today, the Buffs skimming just below cloud height on the way back to Barksdale. It appears to have been a very successful deployment - diverse range of sorties flown over various bits of Europe and beyond, plus some range time and possibly one strike in Syria.

At a similar "onside" large bomber crew gathering, I well recall a feisty 2 star USAF general saying in reply to the ill-judged remark "I'm a fighter man myself", "Gee, Sir Williamson (sic), I was always taught fighters are fun, bombers are important". Brought the House down.