It’s been a while since my last post in the series ‘Beautiful Destroyers’. But here the series is back on track again with some lovely pictures of three beautiful aircraft participating in the joint Royal Air Force/Indian Air Force exercise ‘Indra Dhanush 07’, which took place in, you’ve guessed it, 2007.

In these pictures, we see the RAF’s latest fighter, the Eurofighter Typhoon, flying in formation with the RAF’s other main front-line fighter, the Panavia Tornado F3, and the Russian-designed Sukhoi SU-30MKI, which still carries the NATO reporting codename ‘Flanker’, which is currently in the inventory of the Indian Air Force. For identification purposes, in the header picture for this post and in the shot below, the aircraft nearest the camera is the Tornado, then the Typhoon, and the one furthest away is the Su-30.

Clever stuff, all that formation flying; amazing what you can do with being able to keep an aeroplane straight and level. I’ve done formation flying myself only once, and I was too busy avoiding collisions to take any photos. But it’s an amazing feeling, seeing an aeroplane only a few metres away (in this case piloted by my son) and seeing it just like floating there. A photo doesn’t really do it justice; it’s like nothing else I’ve ever seen. There’s this plane just hanging there in the clear air, and you can see there’s nothing really holding it up. Remarkable.

Anyway back to the pictures:

In the picture above, you can see the Su-30 in more detail. An extremely powerful, agile and well-armed aeroplane, the Su-30 (which is a derivative of the original Su-27) is a very capable combat aircraft, in fact probably one of the best in the world. She weighs 22 tons but her pilots throw her around the sky like she’s a Spitfire….

And finally, another photo like the main header photo above, but taken from a slightly different angle. And it’s bigger….

So there we go. Sorry to have kept my aviation-fanatic readers so starved over the last couple of months. I know of one guy at least who only reads my blog for the aviation stuff; Captain ‘Pyet’, this one’s for you mate 🙂