The RAF’s Red Arrows Perform at AirVenture for the First Time

Story and photos by Ken Kula

The Royal Air Force’s Red Arrows military flight demonstration team made an extraordinary North American appearance in 2026, timed to coincide with the American 250th birthday celebrations at several East Coast air shows and aerial parades. The historic tour, named Operation Eagle Hawk, saw ten BAE Hawk trainers cross the Atlantic Ocean with several support aircraft.

The team’s final display of their month-long tour was at the largest air show in the world, the EAA’s AirVenture Oshkosh. The Red Arrows performed during the last three days of the week-long celebration of “all things aviation”.

Several “firsts” occurred for the Red Arrows this year. This is the team’s first year with Wing Commander Sasha Nash leading the team, she’s the first woman to command the Red Arrows. Another historic event for the sixty two-year old, world-renowned team was that these were the first performances by the Red Arrows in the skies over Oshkosh. These were viewed by many of the almost-three-quarters of a million spectators who attended the week-long celebration of flight.

Several Hawk trainers arrived earlier, but on Wednesday evening – between the daily air show and the nighttime show, seven red, white and blue jets arrived in formation and made several passes over the field before landing.

After taxiing to their marshalling area and a quick pilot debrief, and while maintenance crews worked on the new arrivals, a planeside interview event for media representatives convened. I got to speak with Red 8, Flight Lieutenant Matt Brighty. I was keen to see how US air traffic control and equipment differences of the British jets were handled by the team members.

Interestingly, the seven jets flew VFR from Willow Run, Michigan to Oshkosh, below 10,000 feet of altitude.

The Hawk doesn’t have a modern glass cockpit which simplifies navigation, so the pilots used the ForeFlight information system on a computer tablet for their navigation and airport information. The Hawk operates in European airspace and the altimeter (station air pressure) settings are given in millibars, not inches of mercury used in the US. When the pilots got a US altimeter setting, they used a conversion scale to translate the value into millibars and then they could input that number into their altimeter.

Flight Lieutenant Brighty also said that he was pleasantly surprised by the handling of the team during the July 4th New York City Flyover. It went smoothly and ATC had cleared the flyby corridor through New York City for an orderly stream of military aircraft – the Red Arrows were the final team in that stream.

The Red Arrows’ Hawks are a fifty-year-old design and are some of the last examples in use by the RAF. Up through last year, the team routinely flew their shows with nine aircraft, but in 2026 they reduced their formation to seven jets, with just a few exceptions with nine jets for fly pasts like the July 4th Flyover. This reduction will help reduce wear and tear to the airframes and powerplants in the next few seasons, until a replacement aircraft is chosen and received. AirVenture’s three performances were made with the seven-jet formations.

Several interesting notes about the Red Arrows performances: the smoke system in the jets always makes white smoke, but for colored smoke, a dye is injected into the white exhaust. Only a minute or so’s worth of red and blue dye is carried, so management of the colored smoke is a crucial part of the team’s situational awareness.

Also, due to the team’s flight speeds and formation types, their aerobatic box required an additional hundred feet of clearance from the crowd lines set for the daily air shows. So, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the initial spectator line was a few airplanes deep into the aircraft parking area. The RCAF’s Snowbirds had a similar restriction placed upon them by the FAA a few years ago; both restrictions were in the interest of crowd safety.

The team’s flights westbound between their home base and their first US appearance in Baltimore contained at least half a dozen intermediate stops enroute, as the Hawk does not have aerial refueling capability. After their AirVenture appearances, the Red Arrows were scheduled to fly eastbound and return to their home base in the UK at RAF Waddington. Their stops included airports in Canada, Greenland, Iceland and at least one stop in the UK.  A support group of two Atlas C.1 (A400M) transports, one Poseidon MRA.1 (P-8A) for maritime patrol/search and rescue, and an Envoy IV CC.1 (Falcon 900LX) for communications purposes accompanied the Team.

Unfortunately, their arrival back to the UK was delayed for almost three weeks, as weather in the air and on the sea precluded safe flights between their planned stopovers. Ultimately, the Red Arrows spent much time at CFB Goose Bay, Canada, both as a weather diversion spot and then as a forward operating base which allowed for planned maintenance to be done on the Hawk jets. The work would have been done at their home base of Waddington in the UK if the original schedule could be met. Several displays and air show performances in the UK were scratched due to the late rescheduled second Atlantic crossing for Operation Eagle Hawk.

By all accounts in the US, the Red Arrows’ first-ever appearance at Oshkosh was a great success. Team members were publicly available at a canopy set up near Boing Plaza; yearbooks and other paraphernalia were given out and conversations between US spectators and the RAF members contained loads of smiles and much laughter. Ground crew members during the planeside media event voiced their satisfaction with the US fans’ responses too. A few of the team had heard about the size and scope of AirVenture and were quite eager to go out and sightsee during the short time they had at Oshkosh.

AirVenture seemed to be the “icing on the cake” of Operation Eagle Hawk.