Air Activity

The skies have been busy over West Ardnamurchan today.  First we had an RAF Hercules C130 transport fly very low across Kilchoan.  It came up the Sound of Mull and then through the gap between Glas Bheinn and Druim na Gearr Leacainn.

Soon after we had three Eurofighter Typhoons chasing each other northwards.  Now that they're to be permanently based at RAF Lossiemouth, we can expect to see more of them, but this is at the expense of the new American F-35. The Ministry of Defence announced yesterday that the RAF's fleet of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters will be operated from the Royal Air Force's Marham base in Norfolk, not Lossiemouth as promised.

Then, at lunchtime, a helicopter came over.  Other than that it seemed exceptionally noisy, there was nothing special about it....

....except that the miracles of computer enhancement enabled the picture to be 'blown-up' so that we could identify the helicopter from its number - G-PDGK.  It's an Aerospatiale AS-365N-2 Dauphin 2 belonging to PDG Helicopters, operating out of Inverness - more here.

To those readers living in cities such as London, where there's a flight passing over to land at Heathrow every minute, our fixation with the occasional stray aeroplane must seem strange.  But here, in the silence, they're so much more noticeable.