Unsung Hero

I was just watching an interesting YouTube about the now long-retired British low-level strike aircraft, the Blackburn [later Hawker-Siddeley] Buccaneer, and its remarkable ability to fly at over 500 knots at sea level, as low as twenty feet. The video was a mixture of ancient film footage larded with AI slop [including the inevitable accompanying piss-poor machine-generated narration that infests just about everything online these days]. I won't mention the 'content' creator, but would simply point you to this video instead for a taster of what this aircraft could do. Obviously, as this was flown in domestic airspace in peacetime, it's not at a particularly high airspeed; but under the combat conditions it was designed for, it could routinely fly under ground radar and fighter cover at high speed, riding its own shockwave, which gave it an unusually high degree of natural stability in such a dangerous flight mode. I once had the privilege of seeing one of these things close up and at some speed, in Nant Ffrancon here in North Wales some years ago. This would have been in the late 1980s or the very early 1990s [the Buccaneer was out of service by 1994]. 

We were out walking up at the head of our valley near Ogwen Cottage and were making our way down to the valley floor on the old road opposite Telford's A5 towards Bethesda. We were about a hundred yards down the back road and so still quite high above Buck's Farm below. We became aware that some manner of jet aircraft was approaching toward us from the direction of Capel Curig, down the Ogwen valley, at which point a Buccaneer, banked hard over at ninety degrees, emerged from Ogwen and pulled the ninety degree turn into Nant Ffrancon, passing under us, revealing every rivet, pock-mark and tiny detail of its under-wing livery as if it were close enough to us to actually reach out and touch the damned thing. Whether this particular bit of extreme aviation was officially sanctioned, I've no idea and frankly, I really don't particularly care as it was so impressive. Marvellous piece of kit. Had pilot and plane failed to make the turn however, I don't think I'd be around all these years later to write about it...