Shannon Airport continues to be used by US military today (May 7th). They don't need to use it, yet they do. With the airport closed each night from 10pm to 5am, and with US soldiers on board the troop carriers now not allowed into the airport terminal building, it imposes additional costs and inconveniences for them to land at Shannon instead of at UK or other NATO airports or air bases.

So why are they still coming and going? Has our unelected government asked the US Embassy to keep us involved in their wars? Or was it the Embassy that told the rejected government that it needed to happen? 

Two planes, Omni Air N828AX and N819AX have been doing a sort of shuttle service through Shannon over the past week. N819AX landed today at 12.14 pm coming from Kuwait via Sofia in Bulgaria on its way to the USA.

N828AX has had a more unusual flight pattern. It arrived at Shannon on Tuesday coming from a number of US bases in the USA and flew on to Kuwait via Sofia. It then flew back via Sofia but landed instead at Lakenheath RAF base in Cambridgeshire England last night Wednesday. It took off again early in the morning from Lakenheath, and flew to the Middle East via Sofia again. Unusually, the flightaware website said it then landed near Gurayat in Saudi Arabia, but that same flightaware website actually showed it landing at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in north east Jordan, close to the Syrian border. This air base is used extensively by the US, Britain and other NATO air forces and the US 407 Air Expeditionary Group has a base there, including MQ-9 reaper drones.

It would be interesting to know who or what they were collecting at Lakenheath last night, given that this is primarily a passenger plane and they did not go all the way to the USA to collect US soldiers.

At 1.38pm (Irish time) N828AX took off from Muwaffaq Salti Air Base (or Gurayat?) and headed back to Sofia.

We're still watching, despite the restrictions on our movements!