Two RAF Typhoon jets were scrambled from RAF Coningsby on Friday after a business jet travelling from Nice lost contact with air traffic control, triggering a sonic boom heard across parts of Essex.

The aircraft, a Bombardier Global Express registered T7-SGH in San Marino, was intercepted over Cambridgeshire before being escorted to Stansted Airport. The jet was directed to a remote stand on the northern side of the airfield, away from passenger terminals, where Essex Police officers determined there was nothing of concern.

An RAF spokesperson confirmed that Quick Reaction Alert aircraft had been launched but declined to give further operational details, describing it as an ongoing mission at the time of interception.

The Eurofighter Typhoon is a twin-engine, canard-delta wing, multirole combat aircraft developed jointly by the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain. It is designed to perform both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions and is equipped with advanced avionics, sensor fusion, and a high level of agility for combat manoeuvring. The aircraft first entered RAF service in 2003 and has since become the UK’s primary air defence fighter.

The Typhoon is powered by two Eurojet EJ200 afterburning turbofan engines, each providing up to 20,000 pounds of thrust with afterburner. It is capable of reaching speeds in excess of Mach 2 and has a service ceiling of approximately 55,000 feet. Its range can be extended via in-flight refuelling, enabling extended patrol and interception missions.

In terms of armament, the Typhoon can be equipped with a 27 mm Mauser BK-27 revolver cannon and a variety of air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons, including AIM-120 AMRAAM, Meteor, ASRAAM, Paveway laser-guided bombs and Brimstone missiles. Its advanced Captor-M radar and Defensive Aids Sub-System provide situational awareness and survivability in contested airspace.

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45 COMMENTS

  2. The BBC article is amusing, some folk in the area had their back doors “rattled”, well Boo Hoo or perhaps BOOM Hoo.

  4. “directed to a remote stand on the northern side of the airfield,”

    Interesting. I thought “Compass Base” was used for possible hijacks and other aircraft forced to land, and was located at the southern end, not the north.
    Hmmm.

  5. ⚠️ Trigger Warning:
    The following content contains references to Donald J. Trump.

    Hello all,

    With the summit between Trump and Putin today, expect “lively” debates—that is, maximum chaos, minimum civility.

    Remember: we’re not here for polite discourse. We’re here for high emotions, wild insults, and general emotional whiplash.

    Here’s the current arsenal:
    • TACO
    • Don the Con
    • Impotus
    • Cheeto-in-Chief
    • Hair Führer
    • Mango Mussolini
    • The Donfather

    If these don’t shut the debate down, escalate to the classics: fascist and racist—or all of the above simultaneously.

    P.S. Don’t forget: if anyone disagrees with you online, this is violence!

    #NotMyPresident

        • You’re not doing my job, you’re derailing the discussion. Keep your comments relevant to the article or they’ll be removed. This site isn’t here for your political rants or innuendo.

          • “Keep your comments relevant to the article or they’ll be removed.”
            Lol. Throw all the tantrums you like, George — we all saw you panic when your ChatGPT headline dropped.

            • What’s going on here? Why the nastiness? We have to keep things on topic — that’s not just me being picky, it’s part of the site rules you agreed to, and it’s tied to our IPSO rating and the compliance agreements we’re signed up to. I’m not here to censor people’s politics, but when the thread goes off into personal digs and unrelated rants, it undermines the discussion and puts us in breach of those commitments. So I’m asking genuinely — what’s driving this? Why lash out? Why are you acting that way?

            • Not seeing any issues on my end and we haven’t had any issues on that front, what is it you are experiecing and I’ll take a look.

          • Every Profile has the same pic.
            It changes every now and again.
            Try looking on another device.
            Unless it’s my end.

            • I’ve checked elsewhere, it was an issue with a service called ‘Gravatar’, it went down for a few hundred sites for a short while. Now it seems our systems are regenerating profile images, it’s also changed mine too, it seems, and has fallen back to my email profile signed up to the site.

          • OK George, BTW, It’s not easy to reply directly to any comment after about 3-4 replies, any chance you can take a look as so many replies are going off target.

            Thanks.

              • Thanks George. Just because another poster mentioned it yesterday, I took a look at the Navy Lookout site and was shocked to see hundreds of comments on most articles. Maybe it was the “nested replies” issue that stopped people posting more here ?
                Either way, please keep up the great work.

                • We used to get a bit more traffic before the reply system broke a while ago. But also we have a much more diverse set of articles that post much more often than NL. Just doing a quick count I think NL had about 11 articles posted in August, UKDJ had over 20 just in “land.” So the “live” time for an article to accrue comments before it dissapears is much lower here.

                  There’s also a much wider set of topics, so I think as an audience we’re a bit more divided about what we think is interesting. A lot of us are here for boats, some of us for army stuff, a small minority for air, and it’s rare that everyone has something to say on a subject. Meanwhile NL has the benefit that everyone is there for floaty boat stuff, so every article might generate commentary from every reader.

                  • Well that seems logical. I noticed a few names that post on both sites but there are an awful lot of posts by just a handfull of people that don’t appear here. Some very long winded stuff and some really silly Ego’s by the looks of it.

                    I think they lack a “Halfwit”, maybe I’ll join in and inject some Humour/non funny stuff depending on ones own perception of what constitutes “funny”.

                    “Permission to come on board” !

                    Maybe now that George has semi fixed the reply system, we might see more comments ?

                  • Indeed, that’s petty much it. Plus, this site actally gets a great deal more traffic than NL every month.

                    • Traffic being the most important part rather than just the comments section here and on Facebook/X I guess ?

                    • Sorry if this is a bit off topic, but is it just me having problems with the search function? I can get the first page of anything I search for, but if there is more than one page it routes back to the front page of the site instead of the other search results?

  6. My back door, front door and all the windows rattle when an HGV passes my house doing well over the speed limit. And there’s nobody to complain to. At least the air force is providing a security service. The HGVs are probably just full of rubber dog shit from Hong Kong.

  8. I think I witnessed one of the jets take off from Coningsby on a YouTube live stream as the plane took off and immediately made a tight turn to the left, then left contrails high in the sky and vanished at high speed??

  11. Hello all. Isn’t a QRA intercepting a problem aircraft over Cambridgeshire a bit of a fail? Kind of thought it would be possible to reach aircraft before landfall, although I guess it depends at which point in transit a problem occurs.

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