Stuck!

Back at the RIAT 2013 Airshow today (see yesterday's BlipFoto entry).

More fabulous aircraft and displays of flying skills.

The French had a rather difficult day today. First, an engine malfunction on one of the Patrouille de France aircraft (#2, I seem to remember) resulted in an emergency landing and a hiatus in the formation display. They had to be back for a fly-past of the Champs Elysées to mark the end of the Tour de France, and they changed engines in the offending AlphaJet, and flew in some spares from France. The arrival of the spares also required diversions of display teams from the runway...

The Dassault Rafale C gave probably the most spirited and noisy display of the entire show, but then got stuck on the runway on landing because the nose wheel would not steer properly. You can see here that the main wheels and the nose wheel are not really lined up properly. You've probably had a shopping trolley like this. That held up the Red Arrows, who had to RDV with the huge A400M. (The Red Arrows are moving towards the takeoff hold in this picture). Some engineers came hurtling to the Rafale, hit things in an engineer kind of way, unblocked the wheel, and the Rafale was able to taxi off (cautiously).

One problem was that the Reds were using fuel just idling, and the A400M likewise, circling round the RDV point. But finally all was well, as you see in these images:
image 1;
image 2;
image 3;

Problems, not disasters, make airshows even more fun, and the German and the Italian pilots seemed highly amused by the French difficulties.

I have set up a more complete set of my photographs for this day here.