RAF Baltic Air Policing

A collection of videos of the RAF Baltic air policing mission

 

Think Defence

Think Defence hopes to start sensible conversations about UK defence issues, no agenda or no campaign but there might be one or two posts on containers, bridges and mexeflotes!

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. mike

    Good to see us back there…those aircraft shelters we put up for the F3’s are still in use today, goes to show how sturdy they are.

    What’s interesting is that there are several other small deployments to other small states…France, Poland, Denmark, Belgium and Canada presently have a small detachments of aircraft (and, for the latter, numbers of troops for security) spread across Nato’s frontier with the old bear.

    Mostly symbolic, a small political/military reminder much like the Falklands det.

  2. dave haine

    Cynical old me, was nearly stirred by these vid’s…I was pleased that they remembered the RAF isn’t just the Jump suited ‘gods’ of the air….

    Mind you….My interpretation of an austere base seems to be a little different to NATO’s… No PSP, no sandbagged tents and no open kharzi’s with unsanded straining bar?

    Finally, why the f**k were they drilling into the hardstanding? You can get Hilti guns (or ‘Ramset’) which fire a bolt into hardened concrete….

  3. WiseApe

    “Ground lines of communication…” – Oh, he means wagons. :-)

  4. Peter

    Looking at the video with the Mig 29’s, it did just make me appreciate that the typhoon appears to glow brightly due to the paint job. While I suppose this might look good at airshows, should it not be painted in something a bit more drab and camoflargy on operations or is there some reason it needs to glow brightly?

  5. Topman

    The paint job IIRC is light so it is harder to spot when in the sky. It wasn’t chosen lightly.

  6. mike

    Just to add to Topmans reply; Dark colours are much easier to spot against the sky (hence all our training aircraft are black).

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