Well, there are a great range of scanners. Personally I use the little Maycom AR-108, which you can pick up for about £70. It doesn’t cover the military 200/300+ VHF range though. As a consequence I don’t pick up things like the Red Arrows.

However, as it does cover the 100+ VHF range I frequently get a few minutes notice of impending high speed non military arrivals, such as Hunters. They often give their callsign and time to arrival overhead. And ATC reply on the same “display” frequency for the airfield.

You also sometimes get chatter between the pilot and ATC during the display – i.e. either ATC may say they have x more minutes, or the pilot may say they are about to perform their final maneouver.

Often callsigns are something like “hunter this” or “spitfire that” or “formation x”, so it is sometimes quite easy to work out what is about to flash before your eyes a few minutes or seconds before. Sometimes they also give the aircraft type, if it isn’t obvious.

I don’t know if they sell scanners that reach into the military bands.

A quick look through Pilot Warehouses website [click]will probably answer that question.

The Military Airshows website [click] lists common frequencies in use at most airshow sites.

My advice is to steer clear of the cheap “Steepletone” types, as they use a rotary analogue tuner – like your old Bush domestic radio – and have no memories or means of continually monitoring more than one channel automatically.