Last month was the Royal International Air Tattoo 2025 (RIAT2025). I've been going to this since the late '90s, and it is an annual fixture in my diary.

For several years, I was a member of FRIAT (the Friends of RIAT), with a pass that covered arrivals on the Wednesday before the show through to departures on the Monday after, as well as access to the FRIAT grandstand at the show centre. A brilliant experience, but exhausting, and in the end, I found it an overdose. Covid came along and broke my airshow habit, so most recently, it has just been a couple of days at the show for me.

***RIAT2025 gave my first view of the new E-7 Wedgetail AEW aircraft.***

***From new to old: the French Navy had brought one of their Bréguet Atlantique 2 aircraft which dates back to the early '60s.***

This year, I was down to one day. I'd just arrived back from a week in Iceland (of which more later, when I get some energy back...), and I could only cope with one day at RIAT before needing to go home and catch up on sleep.

Of course, the weather on the one day I was there reverted to type: grey skies and rain. It did clear briefly during the day, but that didn't last. Hey ho... Anyhow, here are half a dozen from the day that I like. I've put a few more in an album on Flickr.

BTW, I'd not booked a ticket for the show because I'd been away in Iceland and wasn't sure I'd have the impetus to head down there straight from flying back from Heathrow. Because the show always sells out well in advance, I had to go to one of the well-known park-and-view sites outside, hence only planes in the air with no ground-to-ground shots.

BTW2 and FWIW :) All the pictures here were taken using a Sony A1 and Sony 200-600mm lens. Lightroom Classic’s AI AI Denoise is Wow! in rubbish light like this.