Well hello there my old chums!
My first proper photo post in a long time, apologies for that.
So any way, I wanted to share a few shots taken earlier in the year. A friend and I got an assignment to cover an exercise that was last staged in the UK back to 2004 so doesn't come around too often around these parts. The exercise is called Combined Strength and is an annual exercise for the member states of the C-130J Joint Users Group. This time, the exercise was being held in Scotland at RAF Kinloss. However, now that I live in England, it's a bit of a trek to get up there for a couple of days shooting! But heck, was it worth it (as you'll see in a sec)!
So the plan was to spend two days covering the exercise, 1 day on base to get some shots and interview some of the participating crews and day 2 was supposed to be a flight in an RAF C-130J to catch some of the action in the air! (Woohoo, my first flight) Unforunately, Day 2 didn't happen as planned but we made the best out of a bad situation...
Ok, so enough of the chat, the shots below cover some of what we saw:
1. Gorgeous HC-130J from the USCG.
2. US ANG contingent from Rhode Island
3. Norway sent their entire fleet of C-130J's to the excercise (only 2 airframes at that time)
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5. USAF participant from Ramstein, Germany.
6. The RAF aircraft that we should have been flying in on Day 2!
7. But! This is what we got instead. We arranged to catch the Norwegian's low level in central Scotland which meant that after seeing the RAF C-130J in the previous image taxi off on the morning of day 2, we had to drive 100 miles south and hike up a hill for an hour to be ready in time for the flight of two to pass us mid afternoon.
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Oh, the assignment was for Lockheed Martin's Code One magazine!
For those interested, the full article is available on the LM Code One website (link below)
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/article.html?item_id=45Thanks for looking,
Andy
