Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team Red Arrows are on a major tour of North America.  This is the first in more than a decade.  It is intended to promote the best of British and deepen partnerships .

The Red Arrows are on an 11-week North American tour that started in Halifax, Nova Scotia July 8 and will end in Rapid City, South Dakota Oct. 8, 2019.

The aircraft are BAe Hawk T Mk1, a two seater trainer jet that has been replaced by the new Hawk T Mk2.   However, the Mk1 will remain in service for another 10 years. Like the Mk2, the Mk1 is a fully aerobatic, low-wing, transonic, two-seat training aircraft that is still used in a number of roles for the RAF. 100 Squadron, based at RAF Leeming.

The show started about 20 minutes later than expected and unlike the flight path that was released the jets flew a completely different route.

My aim was test the performace of the continuous focus capapbility of the Panasonic Lumix S1R in a high speed fly by. The lens I used was the Lumix S Pro 70-200 f/4. The aperture was set to f/8 and the shutter speed was 1/2000 to freeze motion. The ISO was set to auto and resulted in ISO 250 to 320 for the incoming shots and 640 to 800 for the outgoing images. The focus was set to continuous, drive mode on high and the focus area “Zone Oval”.

There are two sets on images – 20 incoming and 20 outgoing. All images are from single bursts in the exact sequence and unedited. The RAW files were converted and exported to JPG using Capture One. As you will see from these images, the camera and lens performed exceptionally well in maintaing focus.

This the incoming gallery

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This is the outgoing gallery

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