Geoff Fletcher
Up in a Cessna 150 over East Anglia out of Newmarket heading back to Shipdham a few years ago I was surprised to see a Warthog with everything extended come up on our starboard side and formate on us. The pilot gave me a cheery wave! I mentioned this immediately to my buddy Biff who was piloting the 150 at the time, only to see him give a nod sideways to his left. I leaned forward and looked past him to see another Warthog wallowing along on our port side! The three of us proceeded on our merry way like this for several minutes, with more waving and thumbs up and so on, before they cleaned up and opened their throttles and rapidly peeled away. No sooner had they gone than local ATC politely informed us of “military traffic in our vicinity”. It quite made our day.
Mike Cotton
Here is a picture of a pair of Warthogs as seen some while ago:
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Peter Coombes
Any idea what speed the Warthogs managed to get down to? An A-10’s clean stalling speed is about 120 knots, whereas a Cessna 150 likes to travel at 95 knots.
Geoff Fletcher
An interesting point. I do recall the Warthog on my side was nose high with everything down. We were in a hurry as we had to get the aircraft back to base by a specific time and were behind schedule, so I guess we were flat out. It must have been a close margin thing. Why did they do it we wondered – for a bit of fun or a dare or what? Maybe just to see if they could? They gave us adequate clearance so there were no wake problems at any time. It could also be that the incident seemed to last longer than it actually did – time can play weird tricks in such circumstances. I can still see that A10 hanging out there – I wish I had had a camera with me.
Roger Long
The Warthogs went to Fairford RIAT this year (2015).
I saw them on the ranges RAF Valley firing live rounds when we did “Fighter”. What a terrifying racket from the Gatling Gun. It fired depleted uranium shells…
Doug Prior
My friend ran a pub at Eyke a mile down the road from RAF Bentwaters at the time A10s and F16s were stationed there. Pilots from the base came in with great stories.
F16 apparently scared the shit out of everybody. They were so fast everything had to be controlled by computer and the pilot just hung on for dear life.
But the A10 was like flying around the sky in an armchair shooting up whatever took your fancy like an arcade game.
Bernie Newnham, Janis Goldring, Alan Machin, Barry Bonner, Roger Long
It’s probably mostly a bit boring doing endless training, and they saw a bit of fun ahead.A chap Bernie used to know flew Meteors – or maybe Hunters – out of Dunsfold in the ’50s. He told us a story…. There was a lake nearby where people used to take a boat out to go fishing. Maybe Frensham? Anyway, from altitude they’d see someone in a boat, and circle round then zoom over at a few hundred feet in the hope that the fisherman might end up in the water.
There’s a film with a sequence like that, using a seaplane. The seaplane is taking off over water coming towards fishermen in boat who (allegedly) can’t start motor – the seaplane gets airborne just before hitting it and skims over their heads and they fall backwards into water!
A great clip which might have been credible and not a setup were it not for the intercut close-ups, and that they were wearing radio mics!
Its the opening sequence of Spielberg’s 1989 “Always” A RomCom about aerial firefighters in Montana. Some great flying sequences – Richard Dreyfuss is dreadful, however.
Mike Felton, Pat Heigham, Gary Critcher
Unlike the seaplane clip – this one is definitely for real! It’s Alain de Cadanet.
A very well known clip in historic racing circles!
MP4
WebM
View large with the sound up! Bet you duck.
I wonder if there was a risk assessment for this shoot?
Graeme Wall
For the first of the Goodwood Vintage Racing meetings they had a Spitfire do a low pass over the finishng line as Lord March drove his father’s old car across the line having completed the opening circuit. I was standing on the pit building roof to film it and the Spit was level with me, the wing tip about six feet away!
Geoff Fletcher
Roger Bunce, Bernie Newnham
And if you haven’t seen this oldie “405”, it’s still a classic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaIbpSaEoYc&feature=youtu.be
A brilliant film – it even has it’s own Wikipedia page – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/405_(film)
You could probably make it for free now – Blender with Renderman, the Gimp, Lightworks – should do the job.
Pat Heigham
I was working on an insert for the ‘Round the Island’ Power Boat race. Flew round the Isle of Wight in a Jet Ranger with the stabilised camera pod, following the boat. The pilot was Keith Thompson, who did all the aerial stuff for “Treasure Hunt”.
He settled the heli with the skids just above the waves, as the power boat thundered towards us – head on, and at the last moment, lifted up for the boat to pass underneath.
Glad he got it right – would have made a very interesting insurance report!
Chris Woolf
If you think Keith played it tight you should have tried flying with Michael Malrick-Smith, the other Castle Air pilot of that era.
Michael used to cut things a lot finer! He was famed for doing VNE tests at 100ft, and on one occasion passed 33kV grid cables sufficiently “close” that he welded the doors of the Jet Ranger shut. The ground crew never got the machine flying nicely afterwards…
He was, and still is, an excellent pilot, but he wasn’t always for the faint-hearted.
Barry Bonner
On the subject of fishing and planes, Martin Eccles, Andrew Hunter and myself were fishing in our boat on a nice flat calm day off Isle Martin just north of Ullapool when a Phantom (I think) came over so low we could see the pilot clearly. He then did a sharp left turn, went through the sound barrier thus blowing the wax out of our ears and causing lots of little fish to jump out of the sea! There were some complaints from the locals to the RAF!
Pat Heigham
Before the Berlin Wall came down, I had a job for NBC to visit East Germany and interview some of their athletes prior to the then upcoming Olympics.
My cameraman held an instrument rating licence and had a twin Cessna 414. So we flew to West Berlin down the air corridor over East Germany. He showed me the advice to pilots – although the corridor was twice as wide as normal, we were warned that straying out of it, we would be likely to be fired upon!
(Gulp!)
Roger Long
One of the noisiest PTC I ever recorded was a long unrehearsed piece by Brig Richard Holmes in front of Lanc pre flight engine testing. A terrific noise of 4 Merlins flat out for a film about the Berlin 1000 bomber raids.
Pilots suffered from Lancaster Ear and later Shackleton Ear with Gryphons.
The Micron 700 handled it very well.
One of the best UK flights ever was with Jack Belasco flying us down from Bristol to the Scilies very early in a May morning in a Cessna, all at low level and perfect visibility. Another great Scillies flight was with Castle Air from Alan Titmarsh’s house in Hampshire, the pilot,(Michael Malrick-Smith?) showed us various locations he had filmed at and Alan showed us noteworthy gardens en route. All at very low levels.
Other trips spring to mind as fantastic: a Mil 26 chopper flight over the Tigris Marshes before the Iran/Iraq wars that destroyed them and the Marsh Arabs and another Mil 26 out to the South China Sea from Vietnam to an ex French Devils Island prison.
The Goodyear Blimp was another excellent flight over Cowes, a wonderful stable platform for filming.
Tony Crake
Scene.: RAF Bentwaters in the late 1970s… I had just transferred to OBs from TVC and put on the old LO6 type 2.
We went to RAF Bentwaters to do 4 shows in the Phantom Club (!) with some Country and Western Star called Ronnie Profit (Canadian-born country musician and comedy performer).
Ian Dow ( who was a Studio Eng at TVC) organised a trip to go ‘airside’ and actually visit the Warthogs. Two planes were on standby 24/7 sitting out at runway edge underneath a canvas roof (the rest probably underground? ) Two fanatical US pilots were actually sitting in them … ” Yessir we are ready to go NOW and unzip those Russki tanks… Yessir !!!!! ” They were a bit frightening ! Anyway we were given a very good tour including the GAU 8 gun slung under the plane which had some awesome statistics included in a small pamphlet.
Wildlife Adventure
Pat Heigham
During my sojourn with Thames Film Unit, I had an incredibly interesting Schools programme trip to Iceland – made better since we had the right people to show us around with a twin Otter aircraft to flit from place to place. The pilot told us that his father got lost in fog and was thought to have flown out to sea – they were looking for him in the wrong place, as he had actually come down on a glacier (gulp).
The presenter was lovely Pam Rhodes, who rescued a puffin chick which seemed to have been abandoned – got a nice home movie shot of him peeking out from inside Pam’s anorak. I’m ashamed to say we probably ate his parents, as puffin was on the hotel menu.
It was fascinating to see them flying into their cliff top, using the updraught to deposit them squarely on their feet at the edge, like an experienced parachutist coming in to land, and staying upright.
