I'm currently at Hexham in Northumberland, where I've been busy touring some of the Hadrian's Wall sites: Chesters (yesterday), Vindolanda and Housesteads (today). All of which were utterly memorable, and a write-up will eventually be forthcoming; but it was only at Vindolanda that I was buzzed by a very low- and very fast-flying Tornado! It turns out that Vindolanda is within the RAF's Low Flying Area 13, so it's probably a common enough event around here; but it's not very common to me. Although I fumbled with the camera, I did manage to take one picture of it, before it screamed over the horizon:
Here's a close-up:
This was of course very cool, but it did tend to drag me 18 or 19 centuries forward in time, especially since for the rest of the day, every time I heard a jet -- which was frequently -- I'd scan the skies, hoping for another pass ...
I'm off to Edinburgh to-morrow, where presumably I'm less likely to be ducking ground-hugging aircraft -- though having said that, last week I also saw a very low-flying twin-engine monoplane skimming the rooftops near Russell Square (for which it's hard to come up with a good excuse). So, who knows!
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Brett - That is becuase you are not far from RAF Spadeadam which is an Electronic Warfare Tactics Range where the RAF in conjunction with the other services test its tactics against low level threats.
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Let's all go there!
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Pingback from Airminded · Vindolanda and Housesteads on 22 January 2008 at 4:00 am
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