There's a place in London where RAF Typhoons will buzz your car during the Olympics

If you plan to visit London during the Olympic Games and you are an aviation geek, I suggest you to pay a visit to one of the best (temporary) spotting places ever.

Judging by the image below, published on May 2 by the Daily Telegraph and taken during Exercise Olympic Guardian, the viewing area is located somewhere around RAF Northolt airport, in west London.

From there you’ll almost be able to touch the armed Typhoons while landing at their deployment base at the end of their missions to enforce the No-Fly Zone above and around the capital of UK.

The role of the British Eurofighters is, along with several other assets and a few SAM (Surface to Air Missile) batteries settled on top of some residential buildings, to defend the Olympics from 9/11-type of attack.

Last month two Typhoons launched to respond to an emergency signal from a helicopter caused a sonic boom that caused panic across England.

Leave a comment or send me an email if you are able to locate or give direction to the spotting point.



Picture: Julian Simmonds/Daily Telegraph

However, since the RAF does not plan to perform CAPs from RAF Northolt, the possibility to see a scene like the one depicted above are scarce. Unless a practice QRA or an air patrol is launched from there, the base could be much busier during the preliminary exercise than in the Olympics period.

About David Cenciotti
David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.