Fighter jets for the Air Corps?

Text 'Brits' to 51010 for your QRA response!

SMS messages cost €2.00, plus your operator's standard network rate. Please ask the bill payer's permission before handing over your sovereignty and your dignity as an independent State.

Along with direct help with intelligence, allowed some installations in the Innisowen peninsula, and worked plans with the UK for dealing with an invasion and even had an RAF officer attached to the Air Corps throughout the war though to avoid politics he was acting for the Air Ministry throughout.

A sure it's just Navan. Needs painting anyway

I think you would get a quicker responce out of fastway at this stage

I forgot to ask you, why the hell did the pilot decide to crash straight into Navan centre and kill thousands rather than crash somewhere a bunch of innocent people were gathered in close quarters?

The only reasoning you guys seem to have to warrant spending hundreds of millions on fighter jets is fanciful rubbish that lacks logic.

He/she choose Navan because they werent in control of the aircraft.

Would you not be a bit more concerened about the PC12 Spectres the state bought?

I was on a flight from Dublin to Rhodes that day.

As it turned out, we were heading south over the Balkans at the same time that the doomed Helios flight was in a northwesterly track to Athens and unresponsive to ATC calls.

Our flight and perhaps a dozen others were diverted to Thessoloniki and held on the tarmac for over an hour. When we disembarked onto fleets of buses, four Greek AF F-16s could be seen standing by on the outer apron, I never found out if they had escorted any of the other diverted flights, but their strobes were on and it appeared they were awaiting orders.

When we reached the terminal we were allowed to switch on our mobile phones for the first time. At that time in 2005, it was only voicecalls and SMS and as each wave of passengers walked in, you could hear a thousand text alerts all at once as people's families tried to contact them, knowing they were on flights in the region where the News was reporting an unresponsive flight of indeterminate origin.

As we know now, the Helios flight entered an automated holding pattern for its scheduled stop-off in Athens, with the flight crew and passengers suffering from Hypoxia. Two members of the cabin crew on an independent oxygen supply, visually acknowledged the fighters that had intercepted the 737 and attempted to retain control, with one of them an early trainee pilot. Unfortunately the engines flamed out in turn from fuel starvation and the plane was sent into a languid spinning descent, with the two cabin crew seeming to have had a hand in directing it away from heavily populated areas before impact with the ground.

Later in the day we continued on to Rhodes, in silence for the most part, having learned of the crash and reassured our families we were not involved.

It was the most sobering incident I ever personally experienced in aviation until 9 years later, on the way back from Australia, a few days before Easter, I walked in to the transit lounge in Dubai Airport to be greeted by the sight of dozens of people in bandages and dressings, with crutches and wheelchairs. Some of the survivors of the Brussels Airport bombing who were fit to travel, were being escorted onwards to the places they were trying to get to when the terminal was attacked. Sickening.

Not sure you hit that on the head

Walt...

Living in Dublin your whole life.......

Probably did it all on Zoom...................

Has started a good few trollish threads imo.

https://youtu.be/lHbZou96KZw

One for the albatross fans -