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!

 

   

Jan Eenling 2008©