On wednesday, september 20th 2006 we were welkom at the Vliehors "Cornfield" range at the island of vlieland in The Netherlands. The Vliehors range is used by a wide variety of NATO aircraft and is opened monday to friday. The Spotting Group Volkel had organized this wonderful trip and my thanks go out to the organzers who did a wonderfull job! 

We took the ferry on tuesday afternoon and checked in at the hotel one-and-a-half hour later and went straight to the local pub for a few beers. After some beers we went to sleep and were picked up the next morning by a 'taxi' from the RNLAF wo brought us to our final destination. The range's tower. 

At the tower we met the staff who were on duty that day and they told us what to expect. "Two German tornado's who will do some low level straffing, and that's it guys..." 

Ooops, that isn't much... The Fighter Weapons Instructor Training (FWIT) wich was an ongoing excercise out of Leeuwarden AB and was also booked at the Range but unfortunelately at medium level (20.000ft) so no aircraft could be seen. 

The tornados came in for their straffing runs just 5 minutes after we arrived. They were practising at the targets on the northside of the range. After their attacks the controller at the tower asked them if they would do a fly by. And the tornado's were in the mood for that. After the controllers words: "You can make it special" they DID make it special and came in at a very low level and very high speed. NICE!

Some more good news came to us wenn the controllers had arranged an AB412 for us to do an rescue demo. And even more good news came from Volkel AB. 4 F-16's were destined to do some medium level strafing at 14.30hrs. After an nice demo of the AB412, a single F-16 came in for another veryt nive flyby. There after it was lunchtime and we had to wait until 14.30 for the next action. 

At noon the FWIT party were doing their bombing runs on the range but no aircraft could be seen. We had pinned our hopes for the 4 Volkel-F-16's. (Callsings: Metal 1-4) At excacty 14.30 the four vipers turned up and began their medium altitude straffing runs. After some runs Metal4 called an "Over -G" he had pulled to hard on the stick and stressed the airframe of his viper (and probably himself) too much and returned immediately back to Volkel. 

The other three "Metals" continued their runs, and they had probably seen us on the tower (or the controller had asked them) but our dream came true. There were coming in for a three-ship flyby South-North and thereafter single ship flybys north-south. The S-N flyby was really spectacular, and wenn they were over the north sea they split up an came back. You could see that they were coming in very low and very hard. The first two were busting the tower and we were astonished! But then came the third viper, and he was even lower that the other two and busted the tower at full burner. An amazing experience!!! We all talked about this last flyby for a long time... 

This was one great experience.