Can anyone confirm this, I was present at the BoB 50th anniversay flypast at Buckingham Palace in September 1990, only a few weeks after the invasion of Kuwait, and the first aircraft in the leading diamond nine was wearing this particular ‘pink’ camouflage scheme, I don’t recall whether it was a Jaguar or a Tornado, I have slides somewhere, but we all thought at the time that it was a chilling foretaste of things to come.
As I recall, Humbrol very quickly brought out a tin of the requisite paint, which was a pinkish colour, (but not as much as those SAS desert Landrovers), applied to all aircraft, or so I thought.
At the time, my son was of an age where he was well into model kits and we had a right time adapting current kits into combat models with much use of a Rapidograph pen and bits of plastic and of course, that life saving Humbrol paint.
The USAF never adopted a different colour scheme as far as I know, so why did we bother spending all that money for nothing, the government must have employed a team of ‘experts’ who knew better.
Airshows in 1991 were really the place to be in the wake of the Gulf War, Mildenhall was magnificent, and I cannot forget the sight of those two ‘pink’ Buccs weaving their way across the runway at Finningley while the Tornado F3’s kept CAPS overhead.
I’m shifting stuff around between the loft and garage at the moment, when I come across my paint box, I’ll see if the Humbrol paint tin has a BS reference on it.
I presume our Jags, Buccs and Tonkas were painted a different colour to the Americans is their different use. Our jets initially did most of their flying sub 200 foot whereas the Americans, well, didn’t.
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