Annually the Royal Netherlands Air Force helicopter squadrons based at
Gilze-Rijen head to Portugal or Spain to conduct their brown out flying
conditions training. It was planned to fly to Spanish air base Zaragoza
in 2020. From there the squadrons would fly to the several sand areas
available. Due to the world-wide COVID-19 (corona) pandemic the Defence
Helicopter Command foreign training schedule was heavily impacted. Not
only for training purposes but also to 'export' noise 298 (Chinook), 300
(Cougar) and 301 (Apache) squadrons deploy to other countries. These
include mountain training in Italy, radar evasive training in the United
Kingdom and training of brown (or snow) out conditions. The DHC decided
to organize the last exercise in The Netherlands. Normally known as
exercise HOT Blaze it was renamed HOT NL for the 2020 edition. Both 298
and 300 squadron would take part in the exercise. Royal Netherlands Army
11 Air Mobile Brigade also took part by providing soldiers which
resulted to supports each other’s training needs at the same time.
From August 17 until September 4, 2020 several locations would be
visited by the Chinook and Cougar crews. During the last week operations
in darkness were trained.
Below photos were taken at the Oirschotse heide which is more known as
GLV-V. It's on of the low flying areas assigned to the DHC to train the
helicopters crews. For exercise HOT NL several GLV's were used while
also non-standard training locations were assigned. Within these
municipalities the flights were made: Amersfoort, Apeldoorn,
Barneveld, Elburg, Epe, Harderwijk, Leusden, Meppel, Nunspeet, Oirschot,
Soest, Steenwijkerland, Westerveld en Zeist. |
