Royal International Air Tattoo
Date: July 20th, 2024.
The Royal International Air Tattoo, (RIAT), took place on Saturday 20th of July 2024. The show is billed as the largest and best airshow in the world. It is certainly the largest military themed airshow in the United Kingdom. The venue is RAF Fairford, northeast of Swindon. This is not an operational airfield but it has the longest runway in the UK which is ideal for some of the visiting aircraft.
I first attended RIAT in the 1970s when it was based at Greenham Common. I was due to go last year but the weather was atrocious and half the aircraft were not going to be flying so I didn’t go. I had been the previous two years. I go with my friend Kevan Smith, and we set out early as it’s a two hour drive to get there before the local roads become too congested. There was about a 15 to 20 minute queue waiting to get into the car park, and that was to be expected. On leaving the car, we had about a 1 mile walk across the airfield round other car parks before we got to security, and then from security to the ticket checking, and then we were into the Showground, and only a quarter of a mile to where we had our flight line tickets.
The plan had been to get there really early to give us a good couple of hours to look at all of the aircraft that were on static display, and there are a lot of them. But as it took longer to get into the Showground than expected, and by the time we’ve had a bacon roll and a cup of coffee, we had about 45 minutes to quickly view some aircraft before heading to the flight line.
We arrived on the flight line approximately 10 minutes before the flying was due to start, which was 10 am. We had tickets for the viewing village area on the flight line. Cheers were provided and there was catering and toilets dedicated to this area.
The weather was forecast to have intermittent light rain and be cloudy through until about lunchtime, then the chance of rain would pick up and by 4 o’clock thunderstorms were expected. The runway runs East to West with the planes taken off from the east. We were about 2/3 away along the runway from the eastern end. Unfortunately, this meant that many of the aircraft had either taken off or landed before they passed us. As mentioned, the weather was cloudy all day, so the light varied from poor to quite dark. Although we were standing with our backs to the Sun, which would’ve been ideal on a sunny day, this made little difference given the cloud cover. As it happened, the weather was drier than expected but remained cloudy all day.
As RIAT is a predominantly military show, it is mainly jets and helicopters. There was one spitfire flying, and it was nice to hear the merlin engine, however not worrying about propellers made the photography a lot easier.
I won’t go into the flying agenda, but the highlights, were the Red Arrows, the F-16, F-18, F-35, Grippen and Typhoons. In addition there were a number of displays around this year’s themes. The themes were 50 years since the F-16 first flew, so they were due to be F-16s from all over Europe, highly decorated for the event. However, at at least two of these had faults and did noy fly. The other theme was the anniversary of the founding of the Royal Canadian Air Force, so there were a few Canadian aircraft present as well. The third theme was the 50th anniversary of the Hawk, which is flown by the Red Arrows, and the display teams from Saudi Arabia and Finland.
The photography challenges were down to the poor lighting on the day. With the heavy cloud cover and the need to shoot at about 1/2000 sec, (1/8000 for the opposing pairs), to freeze the fast jets, I was shooting at an ISO number between 1000 and 3200. It’s more important to actually get the aircraft in focus and get them sharp avoiding motion blur by having the high shutter speed, then to worry about the noise levels in the picture. Generally, these issues can be cleaned up nowadays in software.
The display was well organised, they kept to the published agenda other than a few last-minute changes, but substitutes were slotted in as needed. The flying started at 10 o’clock and the last item on the agenda was the Swiss display team starting at 5 pm. We stayed for six hours, up until around just after 4 pm when we watch the RAF typhoon display aircraft, this year painted in 1944 Normandy black and white invasion stripes. After the Typhoon were due to be at least three other flying items, which didn’t look that interesting, so we left and made our way back by bus to the car park, for the long journey home.
On reviewing the photographs of which there were 2,800, the vast majority were in focus, with a high enough shutter speed to keep the subject sharp. The noise levels were high, I used the AI noise reduction facility in Lightroom, and then for many of them took the photographs into Photoshop/Topaz denoise for a final cleanup and sharpening. Overall, I was pleased with the photographs, and although the weather was poor, it was a great flying display.
I am already planning a return for 2025.
