The Northern A 400 came past my house. The only two fixed wing aircraft airborne over Scotland are the A400 and an RAF Poseidon out of Lossiemouth


https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....24ea6b04f7.jpg

An Airbus A300 Beluga just landed at Chester from Hamburg after doing a wide orbit south of Speke. There seem to have been quite a lot of Beluga movements into Chester during the lockdown.

The A400 out of LGW passed over me earlier. Anyone know why they were overnighting at LGW ? It can't be busy at the moment, but nevertheless it seems unusual.

Don't think the A400s overnighted, just came in for some circuits this morning.

Qatari Herc A7-MAH just overflew, inbound Stansted I think. Nope, Cambridge.

I have a view of a Shorts Belfast from my office.

A BA 747 floated by me last night operating a CPT-LHR sector. It must be one of the few pure paeenger 747's operating at the moment. KLM still seem to be using their Combi steeds to/from South America, but no-one else appears to be doing the passenger 747 thing.

SpringHeeledJack, KLM's 747-400 Combi is exclusively operating to Asia (freight only). Three aircraft have been brought back into service after a deal was made between the Dutch government, Philips and KLM to create airlift capacity for mostly medical supplies.

The 747's operating to South America are -400 freighters (3xERF and 1xBCF) operated by Martinair.

Hungarian C17 out of Papa Air Base now on the ground at Farnborough

The map of Scotland was interesting, several times in the past month i have looked at the area west of LHR out to almost Bath south to the coast , north to Northampton/Milton Keynes and we seen nothing but a couple of helis in an area that is normally flooded with those' little yellow planes'. These diagrams really sum up the dire situation the airline industry faces.
This is especially true in the Uk since Quarantine has come months too late and what the value is when we are one of the highest infection rate countries in the world where people are only going to visit if it important due tot he high risk of catching something here compared to where they are from.

The map of Scotland was interesting, several times in the past month i have looked at the area west of LHR out to almost Bath south to the coast , north to Northampton/Milton Keynes and we seen nothing but a couple of helis in an area that is normally flooded with those' little yellow planes'. These diagrams really sum up the dire situation the airline industry faces.
This is especially true in the Uk since Quarantine has come months too late and what the value is when we are one of the highest infection rate countries in the world where people are only going to visit if it important due tot he high risk of catching something here compared to where they are from.

Spitfire G-AVAV airborne from Biggin! :) Wish I could see and hear it, looks like it's already made one trip down to Beachy Head.

It was one of the mythical NATO C-17's no less!

Thanks for the detailed info, I saw them in KLM colours and thought that they were KLM, rather than Martinair operated. I'll need to read the details on the idents a bit closer ;-)

Spitfire G-BMSB also airborne from Biggin!


That would be a lovely thing to see flying again...

Lufthansa are still operating the 747-8I, though I don't know if they are actually carrying passengers.

U-2 68-10337 westbound across Denmark at 60,000'!

​​​​​​​SpringHeeledJack been watching these flightsall week, BA LHR-CPT since Sunday.
 

SpringHeeledJack been watching these all week, BA LHR-CPT since Sunday on both Flightradar24 and , we can see actually them to the east of Ascot heading south as we are East Berkshire . They BA have been using 747’s all week on this sector, either G-CIVP or G-CIV0. Other BA long haul , from LHR seem to be more 787’s than 777’s , now that they are very slowly, starting to fly again ..makes sense at the moment.

Might have been me if it was October 2001. We did Gander to Coventry, 9h05m. British Antarctic Survey’s Dash7. It had been on maintenance in Toronto before heading back to the UK to pick up equipment, ready to head South for the Antarctic season. Another crew once took it non-stop from Churchill Manitoba to Prestwick They were heading for Coventry but couldn’t quite make it - not surprised, as they landed after 14h10m in an aircraft that we always considered to have 12 hours to dry tanks. (We had the Aux tank mod, but full fuel in an empty aircraft put you at max takeoff weight.)
Think they surfed a strong tailwind, but do remember hearing that they had the heating off as well to try and save fuel...

French Connection

Indeed the BA 747s enroute to Cape town do stand out-I live in Camberley so they pass just east of me making a noise that will sadly be gone forever so I enjoy them while I can . On the subject of BA aircraft the 787 seems to be in its element at the moment as, perhaps surprisingly, are the 777-200s which seem to be the plane of choice for a lot of former 747 USA routes. Be nice to have a Spitfire come my way though, summer time usually brings a lot of low level 'unusuals ' passing west of the large telecom mast at Bagshot to stay outside the London TMA

This one was US registered and about 6 or 7 years ago - just looking through a list of survivors, think it must have been the US Department of the Army who seem to have a few. It was up around 18000' heading east towards Dover.

Certainly quite an endurance then!

I remember seeing a Yemeni one passing overhead my Surrey school on delivery back in around 1980 - think it was out of Prestwick and I assumed it had probably stopped in Greenland and/or Iceland but perhaps not! We used to see the odd Twin Otter on delivery too - and if we were lucky a Caribou going the other way (ex Tanzanian AF, probably now at Cape May with all the other might have been turbine conversions... edit: no, scrapped at Shannon.)

USAF KC135 62-3551, currently flying orbits 16,000 ft just south of the Isle of Wight. Unusual for this part of the world, whats uncle sam up to I wonder?