For those of you overseas, here in the Uk we remember our military loss on the nearest Sunday to 11th November – the 1st World War having ended at 11am on 11th November 1918. There is always a big parade at the Cenotaph in Whitehall but every town has its own small parade centred around their war memorial.
Ipswich’s parade normally includes a contingent from the Army Air Corps (AAC) that is based at RAF Wattisham. We didn’t get down to the Ipswich parade but were watching the parade in Whitehall on the TV. Just at 11am when we all observe 2 minutes silence, there was the sound of military helicopters over the Wet Dock. It was two AAC Apache helicopters on their way to a fly past over the Ipswich parade.
Apaches are notoriously difficult to photograph. We used to live in Tuddenham St. Martin and the AAC use that village as a turning point on their regular trips to and from their practice range at Woodbridge so I have lots of experience at photographing low flying Apaches. However, they are painted in a very matt dark green drab which is totally non reflective so, unless the are flying in direct sunlight, you can barely make out any details. Anyway, here are two shots that I managed to take. One against the blue sky.
One against a cloudy background.
Just to show you how little there is to see, this is a large blow up of one Apache.
Having seen them at airshows, I understand the difficulty in getting decent photos. These are pretty good, I can almost hear them 🙂