KC135R's airborne
 

Interesting - 8 x KC135's airborne in trail Northbound and 2 more joining up behind (10 total)

Wooo, woooo

IG

Do you mean KC-135?

A couple in the South East and another to the West on the Welsh border - 11 in total? Interesting!

Now going feet wet over Newcastle. I wonder if Minot are having another Baltic cruise today?

Probably off to Exercise Ruska 2020 in the airspace of Sweden and Finland. Taking place until October 6th.

The one over Manchester, Bronco31, is actually a C130 out of Moron, Spain. Bit of low level in the Lake district and Scotland before going back there.

They all went home on Saturday, apart from the poorly one which departed last night.

Thanks d_p.

Re Ex Ruska, It does seem that they are going the long way if so. Presume those that have broken off and are heading south have topped up the others? Main group seems to be heading for Germany now.

No mention of any USAF involvement as far as I can discern.

FWIW Ex Astral Knight finished last week.

So all in all its all very intriguing.

Very intriguing. They are all now south bound over the southern North Sea. I wonder if that was a practise survival scramble? OK, time for lunch ...

You never know a flight of B1s may pop out of ADS-B stealth mode behind them at any moment...

With ADSB those KC135's could easily be B1/2s, who's really looking. (One on, one off)

IG

Exercise WolfPack according to FC

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EjFB39OXsAQ3Z5i?format=jpg

Quote: "Exercise WolfPack is important for the 100th Operations Group as we begin to shape and build our Agile Construct Employment construct for the 100 ARW". No, me neither....

Our local newspaper the EADTimes recently said there would be joint excercises between the RAF and USAF starting today,I think, with Coningsby and Lakenheath aircraft taking part and I recently counted 9 KC135s on ADS-B in the middle of the North Sea in the Dogger Bank area,there was also an RAF E3C? awacs in the air just off the River Tyne.To add to the equation HMS Queen Elizabeth is somewhere in the North Sea with a full deck of F35s.Big fuel bill !!
Colin.

think you will find most KC135s cannot receive - only a handful of the tankers have a receptacle.
and before some smartarse points out that they can actually receive via the boom (backwards), I believe that is not a normal MO.

Does G-VYGM currently heading to LGW ex ARN have anything to do with this? Just curious.

It is using 9L flight number so presumably a wet lease

9L is the in house 2 letter code for Air Tanker (nice mil reference with that code as well)

Elephant walk
 

Started off as elephant walk ..with dozen or so ..I turned up just as they were finishing and then the tankers lifted off. So here are my grainy images as it was gos awful weather.

cheers


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....bbf7222ae.jpeg
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....05f293313.jpeg
https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....8afdcc5ed.jpeg
https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....1b1432b82.jpeg
https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....4cd940a32.jpeg
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....d29fe5b58.jpeg
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....eea988da4.jpeg
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....da298e5e3.jpeg
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....3fb283be4.jpeg
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....07f97c709.jpeg

Now I understand why this happened ....

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54337980

:)

It's you lot following the tankers !!!