Tuesday the 19th of Sept and I had set off for my usual visit to Sandwood Bay as was in Sutherland, Northwest Scotland, at the start of a week long road trip.

I don't always carry a zoom lens due the weight of the Canon 100- 400 in my pack, you begin to feel it a bit with the four mile walk to get to Sandwood, more so on the way back !

How pleased I was to have had it to call upon when I looked up at an aircraft circling overhead Cape Wrath which is about twelve miles North of Sandwood, I knew that the M.O.D. Firing Range at Cape Wrath was active that day but the last thing I expected to see flying over it on excercise was a B-52 Stratofortress of the United States Air Force.

These majestic strategic bombers are based at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, USA and this was one of a deployment which had arrived earlier in the month at RAF Fairford to take part in various excercises both there and in Europe.

This aircraft was using the callsign " BUFF02 " as three B-52's had taken off from RAF Fairford that morning, the BUFF callsign is given as the B-52 is rarely given its official name of Stratofortress and is more frequently informally referred to as the BUFF ( Big Ugly Fat F****r )

A rare sight to see one of these aircraft in the skies above Scotland.

Not the best of images which follow, but please bear in mind it was a reasonably fast moving object twelve miles away and I estimated flying at about 18000 feet.