FOLLOWING a two plane crash over the skies of Kastelli airfield in Crete back in March 2010, the Red Arrows acrobatic flying team are back in the area, and were in training, including being heard and seen over Heraklion today as we were shopping in the town.
We saw them, first in formation, and then in what appeared to be a low level exercise, before they roared off. The team are currently based at RAF Akrotiri on the island of Cyprus for nine weeks of intensive training.This deployment is called
Exercise SPRINGHAWK and it is a very important step in the team’s workup
training in preparation for this year’s display season.
There are some very important reasons for the Red Arrows to go to Cyprus and it
will certainly be no holiday. The most important reason for this
exercise is the guaranteed good weather which they just don’t get at their
home-base of RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. Also, the Akrotiri peninsula
allows the pilots to practice over a large number of different types of
display sites all with different characteristics.
The most popular
display site that they use is called ‘The Cliffs’. It is flown over the
sea and the flying conditions are always perfect with no turbulence (or
in pilot speak ‘bumps’) for them to worry about. In contrast, ‘Golf’
dispersal is flown over part of the airfield and by lunchtime is very
bumpy as the sun warms up the land creating convection.
Although the
pilots don’t normally enjoy this site, it is extremely valuable flying
and simulates a typical UK summer overland site on a breezy day. ‘The
Wreck’ is another different site, again over-sea but it always has a
strong on-crowd wind for the team to get used to. This
type of wind is common during the summer and can be challenging to
master. All these sites are within the RAF Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area
and are literally, on the doorstep. This allows the pilots to rehearse three times every day, five days a week and gives them the opportunity to
concentrate totally on the flying.
