After a year of absence this year the
operational intergration exercise was held again at Kleine Brogel
airbase. Like former editions of this spectacle it promissed to be a
good one again and boy were we in for a treat! No less then 70 visiting
aircraft of which most of them flew a sorty and some of them several
giving us plenty of nice photographic opertunities. Because this event
isn't an airshow pilots are not bound by certain restrictions and they
try to show us the best they have with some spectacular passes overhead
leaving vaportrails
from tight turns and strong pull-ups to leave us
trying to make the perfect shot of this all.This year I started my journey from
Belgium to shorten travel time and arrived at the gate around 0810 to
see there were already some 6 to 700 people wating to get in. This was
for me the first time to see it this busy this early. At around 0830
they already opened up the gate to let the people on base because of the
great mass of people waiting. I had to stand in line for another 40
minutes before I reached the ticketoffice at the entrance but
hey it was
no big deal because from the ticketoffice it was only a few hunderd
meters till the flightline. At around 0915 I was taking my first
pictures at the big platform in front of the maintainancehangar.A few minutes later I set up my
basecamp at the flightline just past the the corner and stayed here
untill the very end of the flyingactivity around 1645. The good thing
about this event is that most of the participating aircraft also do
flying missions so if you are not interested in static aircraft this is
the place to be.
The only aircraft that didn't do a mission were both
turkish F16's and the same for both greek F16's and the spanish F5 did
also not fly. In a serious hurry we did the flightline to be sent away
from the airfield at around 1730 because they wanted to close down. All
in all a wonderfull day and hoping that next years event may be as good
as this one!
