Out in the distant parts of Norfolk, you often see fighter planes out on manouevres flying low over the landscape and off over the North Sea. But today I saw something I’d never seen before: a pair of fighters, possibly F16s from Mildenhall, but they could have been Tornados, in a mock dogfight over the coast.
I’ve never seen these planes perform the kind of tight turning manouevres that they were pulling off this afternoon. They were flying very slowly – well under the speed of sound, and pulling 180s like they were Tom Cruise in Top Gun. I wasn’t the only person out on the cliffs who stopped what they were doing to watch. These planes were even dropping “coutermeasures” or “chuff” which was lighting up the sky to divert the psuedo heat-seeking missiles that the planes were no doubt “firing” at each other.
Typically I didn’t have my camcorder with me, when I’ve been carrying it around quite a lot recently.