The UK’s iconic Red Arrow jets and Typhoon warplanes have been grounded for all but essential flying because of concerns about a potential safety issue with the ejector seats.
It meant a Red Arrows display at the end of the Farnborough Air Show on Friday was cancelled.
Engineers are working hard to check a part in the ejector seat on each of the impacted jets after the Royal Air Force was notified of what it described as a “technical issue”.
If no fault is found on the Red Arrows’ Hawk aircraft, the flying team could yet perform at displays planned in Scotland and Ireland over the weekend, an RAF source said.
It is not clear how long it will take for engineers to check the UK’s larger fleet of Typhoon fighter jets before they can be given the all-clear.
All training and exercises have been paused until that happens, but pilots using Typhoon jets on operations will continue to fly despite the risk.
This includes those tasked with the critical mission of protecting the UK’s airspace from hostile threats and an operation out of Romania to police the skies in Eastern Europe to deter Russian aggression.
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“If some baddies come over the horizon, we would be up to shoo them away,” the RAF source said.
The RAF announced the extremely rare move to halt non-essential flying in a post of the social media site Twitter on Friday evening.
“We have been notified of a technical issue which may affect the safe operation of our ejector seats in Typhoon and Red Arrows aircraft,” the RAF said.
“We have paused non-essential flying as a temporary safety precaution until the situation is better understood.”
The RAF has suffered a number of setbacks in recent days.
On Monday, the service had to halt flights in and out of Brize Norton, the largest military air base in the UK, because the “runway melted” in the hot weather, according to a military source.
Earlier this month, the same thing happened to the flight line at another base – RAF Cranwell.
