“peace and tranquillity that rarely comes in service life” is actually seventh circle of boredom 🙂

No doubt about that. Military life is incredibly dull, usually encompassing endless hours of guard duty. My brother is currently serving on the Golan Heights, I don’t think he has read as many books in his entire life as when sitting right opposite the Syrians. Not only that, but being on the frontier away from the population centers and the terrorist threat makes it one of the safest, quietest places to be these days …

Hawk75 is Croatian.

Dan, great picture of the Savoia-Marchetti! We had a thread on the Historic Forum only a short while ago where these aircraft and their Lebanese connection were mentioned : http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=23138

French, without a doubt. Lebanon has always been closest to France, and should the opportunity arise the French will be eager to renew the relationship. They’ll be very forthcoming with the Lebanese, might even donate a few jets. Who knows, maybe we’ll see Lebanese Rafales one day …

Do us a favor and delete that, it’s awful. Besides, Kfadrat will never see them, he can’t access sites with an .il ending. I wish I could unsee them myself.

4/5 years ago? Wow, I’m surprised they were kept airworthy for so long.
It’s really a shame there isn’t more about the Lebanese Air Force on the web. Even the little scraps of information that do exist are hardly trustworthy. While searching for Hunter info I repeatedly came across claims that Lebanese Hunters were destroyed on the ground by IDF/AF strikes during the 1967 war, which is completely false.
Besides the lack of information about its origin and early days, there’s surprisingly little mention of what it was up to during the civil war. Two or Three Hunters were supposedly lost during fighting in the Shuf Mountains sometime in the early 80s, but that’s about all that’s known on what should be a very interesting episode. What side was the LAF on and who was it fighting? Who were it’s pilots? Where were its fighters while the SyrAF and IDF/AF were duelling it out over the skies of Lebanon? Why were the Hunters operated while the Mirages were not? And what about the LAF these days, where is it going?

The Lebanese got 10 Mirage IIIELs and two IIIBLs in 1965. They spent most of the civil war in storage in Ryak and were later supposedly sold to Pakistan. Good luck trying to get pictures, there don’t seem to be a lot of them about.