Go back a long time and I find myself at Red Flag at Nellis AFB and in the fortunate position of being able to take a tanker ride to refuel some of the participants. I won’t go into the details of the flight itself since that is a tale of its own. Instead, I will focus on some F-16s. Most Red Flag exercises seem to include participation by Shaw AFB F-16s. They operate in the Wild Weasel role, and I guess there aren’t many SEAD units, so they get to come most of the time.
Red Flag media events were always a guessing game as to what would be allowable to photograph. Sometimes the Shaw jets were in and sometimes they were out. Sometimes you would only find out afterwards that they were out. On our tanker trip we had F-22s and Shaw F-16s. It wasn’t clear whether they would be allowed or not.
In the end, we shot the planes as they came up for fuel and the USAF team then took all of our cards to decide what we could have and what we couldn’t. This could involve things on the ground that couldn’t be photographed that we had accidentally caught as well as the planes themselves. In this case, the Shaw Vipers were okay, so our cards came back with them included (or at least most of them with some deletions along the way. Here are some of the shots from that day.
I found myself in a plane over Gloucestershire recently and our route took us very close to RAF Fairford. Most of my photos at Fairford are from the Air Tattoo. However, in this case, whilst there was a fair bit of cloud in the area, I was getting shots looking down on the airfield. It has been used a lot recently for USAF missions to the Middle East. Things were a bit quiet while I was there but there were plenty of B-1Bs on the dispersals awaiting whatever might come next. Shooting through windows does not make for great image quality unfortunately.
