Swiss Air Force Team Apologizes for Fly-By in Wrong Place
 

Didn't a B1 or B52 make an approach and fly-past at Blackbushe a few years ago,rather than Farnborough as intended,before going back to the USA,from where it had departed ?

ex82watcher
Mentioned here on PPRuNe way back in 2004: https://www.pprune.org/military-avia...lackbushe.html

...and in Flight Global here: https://www.flightglobal.com/news/ar...-lucky-186086/

I bet they are now!

Thanks Warmtoast - many years before I found this site.

So much for dead reckoning. I say they made a big mistake when they took away the Swiss Armed Forces' bicycles. Well, at least they were not bombers.

Swiss Air display over wrong town
 

Could happen to anyone............. didn't the USAF put on a B-52 display at Blackbushe instead of Farnborough one year?

Surely that couldn't happen to the RAF??!

I recall a Dutch F-16 starting its Biggin display overhead Kenley - I think an absence of audience save a few startled Air Cadets plus some spluttering over the r/t drew him the few miles to Biggin after the first loop...

Or the F111 that did a high speed pass down the wrong runway scaring the poo out of all the gliding activities going on

Cheese navigation
 

The company I did my apprenticeship at, Flight Refuelling (now Cobham) had a similar incident in the 60s apparently. To celebrate some event (probably to do with an exploit of the founder, Sir Alan Cobham) the RAF were to carry out a flypast / small display over the Wimborne factory and all the employees came out onto the riverbank to watch at the arranged time. Some rumblings were heard in the distance and it appears the RAF had incorrectly turned up overhead the similar sized Hamworthy Engineering factory in Poole, some 6-7 miles to the south.

Word got round quickly of the RAF's "mishap" and the story has it Sir Alan phoned up a good friend of his at the Fleet Air Arm in Yeovilton and with the Senior Service keen to get one over the RAF, a pair of Sea Vixen's airborne in Lyme Bay quickly obliged and carried out the flypast and display. The event is mentioned in the book "In Cobham's Company" by Colin Cruddas with the note that one of the Vixen's flashed past so low there were visible strong ripples on the surface of the River Stour in front of the factory.

Bet they had a debrief with no fondue, no spoons

That can happen when you have to fly visually and spot a large marquee with lots of people and car parked around. Not the first time this occur , albeit probably not for them before . Surprisingly they say they did not have someone on the ground to coordinate the slot and make sure no other aircraft is in the display box. We normally all do this . But according the Swiss press it was only a fly-over, not a full show.

Who could blame them joinging a yodeling festival instead of a commemoration ceremony - I can't ;-)
Time for the squadron leader to get a privatly funded Garmin handheld or maybe wait until 2035 for a government sponsored onboard one :p

edit:
Maybe no tea and biscuits but sounds like there would have been some free beer available.

One remembers in the early 70s at the Secret Hampshire Helicopter Base, we were expecting 845 NAS to arrive for some p*ssup or other (sorry - mutual exchange of views and tactics). Airfield waa clear for their arrival, as our RN exchange guys had promised "the Mother of all Beat Ups".

Shame we couldn't see it, but Lasham were very impressed apparently ...........

Red Faces
 

Too right Watcher -

It happened to a formation consisting of a Victor K1A tanker, Sea Vixen and Buccaneer flying past at Bournemouth Airport to support Sir Alan Cobham's Flight Refuelling celebration. Great excitement as Tankers didn't do low level usually.
There had been a practice run the week before with another crew - mainly to practise the low level RV with the Navy jets. I was Copilot on this one too. We did it at over 500 ft but there were big nav problems on the run in to BOH as the H2S was pretty useless down there and the Plotter, facing rearwards with no window, had to rely on his NBS nav computer. My suggestion to use the backbeam from the ILS would have meant installing a non standard X-tal and was not taken up.... Fortunately we were high enough to see the RW and line up visually.

On the big day we had the following crew:
Captain, Copilot (me) Nav plotter, Nav radar, AEO and a further Nav plotter in the bomb-aimer's window Canberra trained, with a map. I also had a 1/4" map on the knee. What could possible go wrong? After the RV the boss decided we should get a bit lower to do the job, at which point the nose Nav could see below but not ahead, once again the H2S was vague and showed off to the Right and the NBS to the Left. From what I could see of ground clues we were a bit right of track. Plotter has to coordinate and decide. By this time the receivers are plugged in and no large heading changes can be made. Nose Nav suddenly identifies a roundabout (the wrong roundabout according my map) which confirms the Plotter in his belief that we are left and he gives a slight Hdg change right. We are too low to see the RW and go blasting over Bournemouth town a couple of miles or so south of the field.
At the subsequent Tea and Biccies the Captain was told that the crowd just saw the top of the fin and were not too impressed.

Just for fun here is a pic of the gaggle on the practice over the Dorset countriside just after the RV but before the run:

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....0041b6e6f2.jpg

Yodelling? Why am I reminded of "The Lonely Goat-herd"?


https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....0172c7d763.png

I mean, how hard would it be to mark the display site with smoke? Just deploy a spotter aircraft ahead of the main package - job done.

When it comes to bombers being in the wrong place, the last people you should point the finger at is the Swiss.

They spent years being accidentally bombed by the allies during World War Two and suffered significant causalities.

There is a reason that the Swiss used to paint their flags on the roofs of their houses!

OH

Yodelling up the valley! Those were the days!!!!

What I hear is that the guys at the yodeling festival liked the performance just fine and the only question around was "who the heck organized that superb surprise?"

The village the festival was is a very short distance from Langenbruck and the people there waiting for the pass actually saw them form up and expected them to come back. It was a festivity to honour a famous Swiss army pilot by the name of Oskar Bider who is from and buried in Langenbruck.

The F5's don't have GPS but they do have IRS.

As this was not a full performance but just a fly by, there was considerably less preparation than in a normal display.

Many moons ago i read about the U2 or blackbird sortie over some bad guys country, they had pushed for a GPS system for years and it and been refused, so the crews chipped in bought a handheld, on one long sortie the nav system failed over bad guys country and the crew managed to complete the mission using their cheap handheld, after that they got them fitted.

Rather like the thousands upon thousands that turned up to see the Vulcan do its farewell pass at EGNX to watch it in the far distance turn and disappear to save time by "cutting the corner".

U2 crews get issued a GPS watch

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/av...aviator-watch/

Reminds me of the time that Upper Heyford F-111s were tasked with an airfield attack at Honington for a station exercise. Such was their navigation skill that the base Hunters tasked with airfield defence were diverted to the Aardvarks to point them in the right direction - which of course resulted in 2 hours in gas masks for us poor unfortunates stuck on the ground, which could have been avoided if the powers that be had left the USAF to find its own way to the target!

I wonder if they ever got home safely!?

85 ish, retirement of wg cdr branch officer FC, John ????? Lightning due to do flypast. Aunty Joan talking to Lightning pilot.
"Where are you?"
"Just pulling up between the two towers"
"We don't have towers",, but there were at Bacton gas terminal.......

Stories like this emphasise just what a brilliant team the Red Arrows are. Never heard of them displaying in the wrong place or confusing timings/run-ins or whatever. Well done chaps - I bet someone will have witnessed something but I never did.

Indeed, The Day We Bombed Switzerland is a great read if you haven't already found it...

The Reds themselves seem a little more circumspect on the subject than that...

The Reds do of course have retrofitted GPS to hinder this sort of cock-up.....

I worked at Pilatus Aircraft in the late 1980's, on loan from British Aerospace, to help sort out some PC 9 engine issues that were particularly problematic in high temperature operations. The relationship between Pilatus Aircraft and Pratt and Whitney Canada was pretty fractious and both companies were blaming each other for the main problem. The local P and WC rep had served as aircrew in the USAF during the second world war, if I remember rightly he had been a B17 pilot. When relations between the companies were particularly strained, he used to take great delight in telling us that he had bombed Switzerland during the war. I don't think it had been entirely accidental as there was some suggestion that the Swiss had been supplying the Germans with engineering components, possibly bearings.

Walbut

But it only takes one mistake.....

There's a joke about Welsh professionals taking years to earn their reputation but Dai only had to $ha& one sheep for him to get his nickname.

Wasnt there a SR71 crew did something similar in England many moons back?
Am sure i watched a interview with a crew member or read it in a book, The got mixed up in a foggy day when ment to do a fly by.

"You've never been lost until you've been lost at Mach 3" is a quote I heard from an SR71 pilot.

​​​​​​The story I remember (here on PPRuNe?) was when an SR-71 almost came a cropper when looking for a group of air cadets promised a fly-by, the crew in question spent a little too much time looking out of the window, too little on their airspeed. Fortunately they realised their predicament in time, and gave the cadets one helluva surprise