Royal Troon is on the approach to Prestwick Airport, which is once again busy. I remember playing there many years ago when the airport was less busy for passenger flights and it was used by BA as a training base for its Concord staff. It was doing circuits and bumps and making itself a very noisy companion as it was taking off over the course, not landing. Then all went quiet. Its landing gear had collapsed and it was squatting on the ground on the main runway closing the airport for several hours.
I've told you before about the USAF pilots we met at St Andrews and how they flew over the course, dipping their wings at us, as they flew out from Leuchars.
A10 'Warthog' Tank Busters were training on a range very close to Hornsea GC in Yorkshire. They were coming in at all sorts of hights and angles firing shells as big as wine bottles. Very scary. Similarly we were once dived on by A10s at Ganton.
One of the noisiest golf courses used to be Woodbridge in Suffolk, at the end of a runway at the very busy USAF base at Woodbridge. The sight of Phantoms taking off with their afterburners on is terrific. The base is now closed. Similarly Greenham Common, next to which is newbury and Crookham, a nice downland course.
RAF Valley on Anglesey, the island off the coast of Wales, is both an RAF training base and also a staging post for many NATO fighters which refuel there when doing low level exercises in Snowdonia. You can often see much of the latest hardware from Anglesey GC which is at the end of the runway.
RAF Mildenhall is being rebuilt at the moment but it is the main US staging post for Europe. Mostly they are giant troop carriers and freighters which land here but you will often see visiting fighters and planes from many NATO nations and quite often they can be seen and heard from Royal Worlington and almost invariably from Thetford. I caught my only glimpse of the SR71 Blackbird from R Worlington.
El Prat, a rather flat but good Arana course (and a second course by Dave Thomas, which I have not played) used to be right at the end of the runways of Barcelona Airport. Sadly they've been ploughed up so that the airport can expand. I don't know where they are moving to, or who the architect(s) may be.
Glyfada in Athens was right beside the old airport in Athens, which is now closed. Unfortunately the course is not worth playing, despite its new-found peace.
When a friend and I played at Joyenval near Paris last summer it seemed to be the point at which the various French military aircraft met up to begin their fly-past over Paris for Bastille Day.
At Denham (Colt) just outside London you can slice onto the neighbouring airfield quite easily on one hole. It was on this golf course that the last airworthy Britol Blenheim crashed a few years ago, killing its crew and destroying the aircraft.
Those of you who fly into or out of Heathrow should keep your eyes open because various routes take you over Wentworth and Sunningdale or Stoke Park and Burnham Beeches, while flying into Manchester you very frequently fly over a good number of courses around Stockport and south Manchester, taking off over Knutsford and Mere.
There's a golf course within the perimeter of the airfield at RAF Lakenheath (a US base) although it is such a vast base that the course is far away from the F-16s. It looks nice - heathland I should say. I've not played it. I did, however, once play the 9-hole course at RAF Waddington near Lincoln. It was at the time converting to AWACs planes, so it was much in use as a diversionary base, with planes coming in from many NATO countries. The left hand side of the 9th hole was an old Vulcan bomber, used for practice at reparing crash damage. It made a great noise when hit by a golf ball. The only problem was that the ball bounced unpredictably off it into the rough and that was the end of that particular ball. I believe the base is now closed.
Some years ago, flying to New York, I looked out of the window as we flew down the coast from Canada. Shinnecock and NGLA were easily spotted.