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OT Gallery / Re: Interesting or unusual planes?
« Last post by TimC on Today at 09:11:27 pm »RAF Airbus 400M just flew down the loch at only 175ft altitude.
Erm, that's lower than many of the surrounding hills.
Took off from Elgin, been flying close to ground through Skye, through the loch valleys of Harris and Lewis ('through' not over). Then Buzzed stornoway airport.
Now doing a pass over the middle of Lewis, still sticking to no more than 150ft off the deck.
Low level flight training?
How are you judging its altitude? You do realise that the Mode C squawk works only on ISA numbers unless you have ATC conversion equipment. The barometric pressure at Lossiemouth is 1024mb. That means the altitude reading from Mode C transponders needs to be adjusted by 11mb (approximately 330ft) to get a reasonable approximation of the aircraft's height above sea level. If you had datalink (as Mode S supplies and the military and civil air traffic authorities can interpret), the radar altitude of the aircraft above the ground can be derived. The Minimum Separation Distance under normal circumstances for low flying fixed-wing military aircraft is 250', and it's not easy to maintain anything close to that in lumpy terrain. Within LFA7T (tactical training area) specially-qualified crews can fly down to 100ft MSD, but it's incredibly difficult to get down to that anywhere other than over ridges or large amounts of water or very flat ground.
It's likely that the A400 was operating to 250' limits, and was in fact around 3-400ft most of the time.