North American F-100 Super Sabre

This hasn’t flown in a whi”e!

Peter wrote:

I have been spending days scanning my thousands of slides and only just halfway through. I spotted this one which I didn't recall, being a rare example of a "live" F-100. It was taken at Mildenhall in July 1985. I didn't see it fly, sadly.

I think that may have been one of the two which were based at Farnborough in the '90s after MOD flying moved out. They were initially based at Hurn but after one went off the end of the runway, asked to move to Farnborough because we still had arrestor barriers and cables available.
They did a lot of maintenance on them some of which entailed high power engine runs and one day, the tower controller on duty who had never seen or heard the type before pressed the 'crash' button when one of them engaged its afterburner with that huge bang; he thought it had blown up!

The only ones Ive seen fly are Danish ones that used to use Tain.

I first saw them at Great Yarmouth when we went on family holiday there in 1959; a couple of days they would fly along the coast just offshore at about 200ft northbound as would other types.
The USAF used to have a European based display team in the '50s/60s called 'The Skyblazers' and they were equipped with F100s; I saw them at Biggin where I heard that awesome boom of the afterburner lighting for the first time.

F-100 at Flixton