Luxeuil Airshow celebrates 95 years ‘La Fayette’
During the weekend of 2 and 3 July 2011 the French Air Force organized a Meeting de l’air at BA116 Luxeuil. The air show celebrated the 95th anniversary of Escadron de Chasse 02/004 ‘La Fayette’ and payed attention to the departure of the unit from Luxeuil Air Base. The unit -with its Mirage 2000Ns- was in the middle of its transition to Istres Air Base, in the South of France.
La Fayette
The ‘La Layette Escadrille’ was formed on 20 April 1916 by 38 U.S. volunteer pilots who flew under French command a year before the U.S. entered WWI. Every year U.S. and French military and civilian leaders attend the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial event in Marnes-la-Couquette, to commemorate not only the 38 original pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, but all 269 American pilots who flew with the French Air Force as part of the Larger Lafayette Flying Corps, 68 of which were killed during the war. For the occasion a Mirage 2000N was painted in a nice color scheme to celebrate the 95th Anniversary of the unit and could be seen on the static.
The airshow
The airshow was held under splendid sunny and warm conditions. The sun was a disadvantage for photographing towards the runway, because the sun was just in the opposite position. Photographing on the flight-line however was splendid. Like usual on a French airshow the majority of the planes was French. A lot of Mirage 2000s, two Rafales and an Alpha Jet. But there were also quite a lot of foreign participants, like the Turkish F-16 demo “Solo Turk” in its black/silver/gold painting was at Luxeuil together with a ‘regular’ Turkish Viper. Other foreign participant werd an Italian EF-2000T, a RAF Hawk and Tucano, a German Tornado, a Belgium A-109 and SF-260s and, maybe the best participant, a Polish SU-22 in Tiger colors. The Spanish Air Force send a rarely seen demo team, the “Patrulla Aspa” with their EC120B Colibri helicopters. A very nice surprise was a low overshoot by a B-52H from Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, on the rehearsal day and on Saturday. The B-52 was stationed at Istres at that moment.
