Volkel AB,  12 April 2007

Today, on my day off, my girlfriend Angèl and I went to Volkel AB to see some of the locals. The weather looked good and as there is a base exercise going on a lot more flying activity can be expected. We arrived pretty late when half the jets already departed but still we managed to take some take off shots. As you can see we were pretty lucky as some of them made a nice bank towards us. When all the jets were airborne we decided to drive towards the landing area to take some shots over there. 

Unfortunately the position of the sun wasn't that good. Also they didn't fly the approaches they usually do. They all made 'grail' approaches, which looks more like a SFO (Simulated Flame Out) approach. This approach is introduced and used for the operations in Afghanistan. And all this is mainly to protect themselves against gun fire from the ground. Just like the Sarajevo-approach for the transport aircraft. So as you can imagine the aircraft were still a bit high, but we tried to make the best of it. Here a small selection of the pictures I took during our two hours visit.