Bournemouth Air Festival

RAF Training Vehicles: the Tutor, the Tucano & the King Air

The Royal Air Force had quite a presence at the Bournemouth Air Festival. They flew displays of no less than four of their training planes. Three of them are either single or twin engined propeller planes (the fourth is a fully-fledged jet, but we’ll come to that later).

The Tutor is where every budding pilot of the RAF and Royal Navy starts out. It is fully aerobatic and single propellered.

Exposure 1/160sec, f/16, ISO 100

Much like the Sea King earlier, I used shutter priority to try to bring out the motion of the propeller. It may look a dinky little plane, but it is capable of some impressive moves.

Exposure 1/125sec, f/18, ISO 100

Unfortunately, as it is quite a small plane, and didn’t trail smoke, a lot of my photos weren’t as impressive compared to the more display-oriented aircraft. Still, they’ve come out quite nicely.

The Tucano is step two on the RAF training programme. Like the Tutor it is a single-engined propellor plane, although it is more geared to preparing student pilots for fast flying and for the cockpits of frontline jets.

Exposure 1/160sec, f/14, ISO 100

Exposure 1/160sec, f/18, ISO 100

Like the Tutor the Tucano doesn’t trail smoke, making it difficult to get a sense of motion in the pictures. This next one, however, at least has a sailboat in the sea to try to show off some of the speed involved.

Exposure 1/160sec, f/16, ISO 100

The King Air is a twin-engined turboprop plane used as a multi-engine training aircraft. Like the Tutor and the Tucano it doesn’t leave a smoke trail but is capable of various aerobatic manoeuvres.

Exposure 1/160sec, f/14, ISO 100

Exposure 1/160sec, f/14, ISO 100

WIth the training planes out of the way, we can move on to the more interesting aircraft.

.

B-17 Flying Fortress & the Battle of Britain Flight >>

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14