A quick trip down to Prestwick today for the Turkish A400 18-0094, first visit to Prestwick for this type in Turkish service. There were a few nice other bits and pieces there, KC135, KC10 and C5 from the USAF.

We had a UAE C17 and an AN-12, with the GAF Tonka still broken and on Royal Navy front there was a Merlin HAS2 out for a bit of sun bathing – they ran it up for 15 minutes and shut it down again. I suspect the crew heard the erie call of the greater spotted egg banjo with coffee, I decided to say that because people seem to make up their own mind about this sort of stuff.

As a follow up to the COP 26 post a few days ago, there seem to be a total of 46 aircraft booked between Glasgow, Edinburgh and Prestwick. With 28 of those being booked at Prestwick, anyway time will tell on that front.

There is a Gallery of nine shots with this post, as usual at Prestwick with stuff going out on 12 in the morning – the light could be better. But what is in the Gallery is what I got before the rain stopped play.

As days at prestwick go it was a pretty good day, not like the days of Prestwicks heyday but not too bad nonetheless. It isn’t that often that there are so many older bits of kit on the ground, so you have to make the effort to get down and see events like this one.

I was nice to have a catch up with some of the other spotters, so all in all a good day.

After the bun fight on ScotAvNet, I probably will not be using the forum much in the future – if atall. I had a quick poke around and came accross an other forum, called “Aviation for All” and have registered.

It is early days and I have only had a quick look at the forum – first impressions are good and the administrators seem to be much more on the ball. The forum has a wealth of sub forums, with all kinds of special interest groups catered for. In short it certainly seems to live up to its title, I will be a regular visitor until I can get a real feel for the forum.

There doesn’t seem to be a specific Scottish section, but I’m guessing that the Northern UK section will cover it. I’ll post an update to this when I know more.

Update

I’ve had a reasonable cruise around the site and there are is a lot of useful stuff on it, but the Northern Regional Airports section is a bit hap hazzard – you have to browse through whats there looking specifically for Scottish stuff.

In fairness, there are loads of excellent snippets of information – but there don’t seem to be regular contributors from the main Scottish Airports. Which I think is a shame, there are not many airport logs posted in ScotAvNet – it just needs people to do the needfull.

If you think that your Photographs and other information on the internet are there forever, think again! It is estimated that 40% of the early internet has now disappeared, that doesn’t take into consideration the thousands of Bulliten Boards and other interest groups that used private servers before that.

Any information or media that you post in places like Facebook or Flickr will go west at some point, you can be certain of it. As far as the internet is concerned, almost none of it is archived. Where you have a paid for service, well it will only exist as long as it is proffitable and paid for.

What information has been lost, well my bookmarks quite often come back with a page not found message – but then I have bookmarks going back to the early 90’s. So it is hardly a surprise that a number of these sites have gone, but it is concerning – especially when you know that what you are looking for was on that page.

I know many people have an aversion to using the resources on the internet for research, but in many cases the information on the internet will outlive the official information. The data retained by airports, safety bodies, air traffic control, airlines and other bodies that hold aviation data – is no longer on paper. With the associated costs of storing legacy data or migrating it to newer systems, the data is no longer preserved in the same way as it was.

It’s not been that uncommon seeing float equiped aircraft at Ashaig, here are three from the same company all in different liveries.  All three have been pretty common visitors over the years, with the Cutty Sark livery being quite short lived as a result of a BBC requirement. I do have some pictures of it just in the plain yellow scheme, I’ll maybe ammend the post a bit later.

The company Loch Lomond Sea Planes made a number of attempts to organise pleasure flights both from Ashaig and Portree, but from the conversations that I had with the people associated with the venture they weren’t a great success.

The dining flights that they did were much more viable, but they now have the same Covid-19 problems as everybody else. The recovery from this is likely to take long and weary, it may well be that the post Covid world is pretty similar to the during Covid world with sporadic lock downs etc…

Many people I’m sure would like to see an air service return to Skye, there have been several lines of investigation into how feasible it all is. However I can say from my time living there that the local MP didn’t even acknowledge my communications and that was before he was the Westminster leader of the SNP.

I have heard figures for the requirements for the development of the airport, but to be truthful there needs to be significant work done. With a 770m runway, the list of suitable aircraft is a bit restricted.

Having now moved from Skye, I don’t actually have a serious leaning one way or the other now in respect of an air service. But I can honestly say that I wish I hadn’t had to do the 800,000 miles of driving over time I lived there.

Plockton isn’t an airfield regularly associated with the military, but over the 20 or so years that I have been a regular visitor – so has the military. They visit much less frequently now than they did when I first visited, but they still make regular visits.

The visits used to coincide with the BUTEC range days, it was pretty decent when there were 200 plus range days a year – but now I understand that there are less than 50 range days a year.

What could be seen there, well regular visits from the Army and Navy rotary wing contingents and now and again there would have been a Harrier although they didn’t land they came to the hover short of the runway and then departed again.

Second hand I’ve been told that an F-35 has visited, performing the same manouver as the Harrier – but that was by the same person who said they had seen a Unicorn outside the Pub, so classified as a maybe.

What types have I seen on the ground, Lynx, Puma, Griffin, Scout, Sea King and Merlin from memory. I’m pretty sure that there will other types, I missed a couple of H-60’s arriving about 30 seconds after they had departed.

So if I’m ever back up in that neck of the woods, I’ll be making a point of visiting Plockton – as you never know what will be in, especially at lunch time.