Look to the skies ...Middle East

Add VE Day 80 to your watchlist There will be no witnesses, bar wind turbines and the odd fish. But at 12.45pm on Monday 5 May, high above the North Sea, an assembly of two dozen RAF planes will gather and fly towards London. At 1.45pm, the formation will fly down the Mall. The RAF VE Day flypast will be led by a sole Lancaster bomber, one of the few planes remaining from the original war fleet. Forty seconds behind will be three aircraft from the air mobility fleet. Then comes “the faster stuff”, according to event organiser Squadron Leader Dan Wilkes. Wilkes himself will be in third place, piloting a RC135 Rivet Joint surveillance plane with two smaller fighter aircraft on each side of him. That sounds pretty hairy. “Yes, the fighter planes will be about 20 feet from my wingtips,” says Wilkes calmly. But then Wilkes is a calm sort of guy. Now 32, he’s been flying since the age of 13. “My great grandfather was an engineer officer in the RAF,” he explains. “His job was to get Spitfires ready for the front line. My grandfather was also an engineer at RAF Cosford. I’d go there as a three-year-old to watch the RAF show from his house. All I wanted to do was join up.” So he did, signing up for the Air Cadets while he was at secondary school in Birmingham and achieving an RAF scholarship that sponsored him towards an aviation qualification. “I got my private pilot’s license when I was 16. I could fly my family around England before I could drive them,” he says. Based with 51 Squadron at RAF Waddington, Wilkes’s day job requires flying alongside other planes at a height of 40,000 feet at around 500mph. So, doing it over London is going to be a breeze? Not quite. There will be a lot to think about. As well as the Lancaster 40 seconds in front of him, and the fighter planes, there will be nine Red Arrows, with their trademark trails, 40 seconds behind him, and then, 40 seconds behind them, a quartet delivering a “signature” package in the sky. Quite the aerial salute. “I’ve helped organise the flypasts for the Queen’s Jubilee and the King’s coronation in the past,” he says. “This one, though, is special. Each of these planes is part of a story to commemorate past sacrifice and look towards what we do in the world. And the flypast will make parallels, between then and now.” He explains why the crowds in London won’t be seeing that totemic symbol of British fighting spirit, the single-seater Spitfire. “The Spitfires are fuel limited; you can only get 30 minutes at a push from them. So, we will be deploying our four Spitfires for smaller VE Day displays elsewhere in the UK. The Lancaster can manage about 21/2 hours, so it will stay airborne after the London flypast and go to subsequent events.” He’s been planning this day since last September and it’s similar to what he does for the RAF normally. “We fly in formation for a conflict, or while delivering humanitarian aid,” he explains. “In a sense, the flypast is in the same vein as any operation we might do around the world.” The whole event will be done and dusted in about three minutes. Then all the planes will disperse to their original bases. “You don’t get the chance to take it all in when you’re in the plane,” says Wilkes. “It’s actually when you get back in the afternoon, and speak to friends and family, or see it on the news, that’s when you get that lump in the throat.” He knows this is probably the last time VE Day will be acknowledged by those who actually fought in the days leading up to that historic moment. “That is why we use the historic planes. We put them into a composition where we can thank people for what they did. This flypast is for the generation who sacrificed themselves for victory in Europe.” Amid much commentary about the size of the UK’s armed forces, he’s proud of what the event might signify today. “There are lessons from how we flew in the Second World War,” he says. “How the Air Force is capable, how it protects allies in Europe, including Ukraine. The key to winning the war, and to what VE Day means, is that there were alliances. Not just with the US, but across Europe. And even 80 years on, VE Day can make us realise how the security of our nation is dependent on the armed forces. That the RAF is ready to defend the UK. We are ready to fly and fight.”

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