The Swiss Air Force is conducting air exercises at RAF Leeming to enable the country’s F-18 Hornet pilots to achieve important day and night-flying, say the Royal Air Force.
According to this news release, Exercise YORKNITE 21 is the name given to this deployment and encompasses three elements.
“An initial contingent of 20 aircrew will be using the exercise to hone advanced skills, whilst the second will be conducting night flying training over the sea.
The third element and a first for this year, is a Swiss detachment that include Cougar helicopters, using time in the UK to train at the Electronics Warfare Tactics facility at RAF Spadeadam.”
Group Captain Crawford, Station Commander at RAF Leeming, was quoted as saying:
“We at RAF Leeming are delighted to welcome our Swiss colleagues back to Yorkshire for some more essential training. We have established a superb rapport with them over the years and welcome the mutual benefit their visit brings.
The contingent nature of current operations means we must focus on rapidly adapting our processes to meet new requirements with an emphasis on collaboration with key allies and partners. Exercise YORKNITE brings all those opportunities to us both.”
You can read more here.
Is Yorknite a two week exercise, by any chance?
They have been flying over my house on a regular basis, day and night. We live a few miles from Leeming.
With all the foreign training going on with the RAF help why don’t they just ask them to do aggressor training while over here as a thank you for us Training them? Or even just ask the danes Dutch Swedish and Norwegian air forces to do the same send 10-20 of your guys over to act as aggressors and we’ll do the same in an exchange that way every nation gets aggressor training on multiple types of aircraft. And no need to spend on new unnecessary aircraft types. Even with some of our eastern European friends with some MIGs. Surly… Read more »
The expense to deploy, even domestically in Europe is very high. Also, aggressor instructors study and practice PLA/Russian AF tactics to simulate them in a training scenario.
NATO has a specialist DACT Airbase Facility at Decimomannu in Sardinia.
Good to see. I revised my received ideas about the Swiss when I witnessed an exercise in progress last century. Hunters spinning through the Alpine passes took some doing.
I think I may have spotted it in this video?
The Mach Loop shoud’nt be a problem for them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NL2blKHxxQ
Many thanks Nigel. Preserving alliances and building new ones – that is the way to go.
👍