How Typhoons Scramble When Trouble Flares
Updated: 4:43pm UK, Tuesday 05 August 2014
By Alistair Bunkall, Defence Correspondent
The deployment of Typhoon fighter jets on short notice is known as QRA - Quick Response Alert.
It is something the RAF has been doing since the Second World War when Spitfires and Hurricanes would be scrambled to meet the German Luftwaffe over the skies of Britain.
QRA operates out of two stations: RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire which covers the southern sector and RAF Leuchars in Fife which covers the northern United Kingdom.
Typhoon pilots do a QRA shift normally once or twice a month. Each shift lasts 24 hours and is normally uneventful. Ground crew do week-long shifts.
The pilots wait to be scrambled in a small building called the Aircrew Ready Room. Either side, the single-seater Typhoons stand ready in what are called Q-sheds, a nickname that dates back to Cold War days when the teams were much busier than they are now.
If an air traffic controller notices a plane behaving erratically, then they might alert the QRA team. This could be because the plane is not "talking or squawking" - not sending out the right data or not responding to communications.
In other scenarios, as seems to be the case in the Manchester incident, a pilot might send out a distress signal.
It is a monitored at RAF Scampton, also in Lincolnshire, the old home of the Dambusters.
Analysts at the CRC (Control and Responding Centre) monitor all civilian, commercial and military air traffic and receive information from the security services daily - Radar maps, flight plans, aircraft squarks.
They will build a 3D model of planes movements - this is called a Recognised Air Picture to identify any anomalies.
RAF Air Command in High Wycombe decides what to do next.
The QRA pilots could be put on high alert, known as a "call to cockpit".
The pilots will race to the plane and do everything short of turning the engines on so they are ready to take off within minutes.
The aircraft are armed.
Everything possible will be being done to make contact with the suspect plane and resolve the situation, but if unsuccessful, the order comes via a black box called a telebrief. The words haven't changed since WW2: "Scramble, scramble, scramble."
The jets will taxi to the runway.
Air Traffic controllers at whichever station has been given the order - Coningsby or Leuchars - will make sure the skies above are clear and free of traffic.
The RAF is still scrambled to observe Russian military jets flying close to UK airspace. That has happened a number of times in the past 12 months.
The pilots record images of the plane or planes they are tracking, and feed them back to base.
It remains a relatively secret process as it is always in an emergency scenario.
No QRA aircraft has had to fire its weapons over British skies in peacetime but they could if ordered to. That order would probably come from the Prime Minister himself.
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