The UK’s iconic Red Arrow warplanes and Typhoon warplanes have been grounded for all but essential flying due to concerns over a potential safety issue with the ejection seats.
It meant a Red Arrows display at the end of the Farnborough Air Show on Friday was cancelled.
Engineers are hard at work checking part of the ejection seat on each of the stricken planes after the Royal Air Force was notified of what it described as a “technical problem”.
If no fault is found with the Red Arrows’ Hawk aircraft, the flying team could still perform in planned displays in Scotland and Ireland over the weekend, an RAF source said.
It is not clear how long it will take engineers to check the UK’s largest fleet of Typhoon fighter jets before they can be given the go-ahead.
All training and exercises have been halted until this happens, but pilots using Typhoon aircraft on operations will continue to fly despite the risk.
This includes those tasked with the critical mission of protecting UK airspace from hostile threats and an operation out of Romania to police the skies in Eastern Europe to deter Russian aggression.
“If any bad guys come over the horizon, we’d be ready to run them off,” the RAF source said.
The RAF announced the extremely rare move to ground non-essential flights in a post on social media site Twitter on Friday evening.
“We have been notified of a technical issue which may affect the safe operation of our ejection seats on Typhoon and Red Arrows aircraft,” the RAF said.
“We have stopped non-essential flights as a temporary safety precaution until the situation is better understood.”
The RAF has suffered a series of setbacks in recent days.
On Monday, the service had to halt flights in and out of Brize Norton, the UK’s largest military air base, because the runway “melted” in the hot weather, according to a military source.
Earlier this month, the same thing happened to the flight line at another base – RAF Cranwell.