FLIGHT Lieutenant Mike Child and his fellow Red Arrows are rarely eclipsed in the skies above Britain.

So it was testament to the scale of the new British Airways Airbus A380 that the pilot described feeling ‘dwarfed’ as the celebrated aerobatic team joined formation with the hulking plane above RAF Lyneham.

The spellbinding display, with the Reds’ Hawk jets flanking the world’s largest passenger aircraft, was hailed as the standout moment of a best of British-themed weekend at the Royal International Air Tattoo.

Flt Lt Child said: “It was absolutely amazing today, especially doing the fly-past with the first British Airways Airbus. The aircraft is enormous.

“It’s big from the ground, but when you’re up close, it’s absolutely unbelievable. It absolutely dwarfed all of us when we were together.”

The two-decker aircraft, which will begin flying in September, finished its flypast with a ‘goodbye’ roll of the wings before the Reds took over the sky with their nine-jet formation.

Low cloud ruled out some manoeuvres but the aerobatic team left long streaks of red, white and blue above RAF Fairford as they executed moves such as the ‘detonator’.

Flt Lt Child, whose call-sign is Red 9, said: “The manoeuvre I enjoyed the most was the corkscrew where six and seven are upside down and eight and myself roll around the smoke.

“There was quite a bit of G force which is all about gravity so I was pulling just over 7G at times, my body feels like it was pulling seven times what it should do. Usually I weigh about 11 stone, so I felt like I weighed nearly 80 stone. It’s a sensation you get used to.”

Flt Lt Child, 33, said he planned to relax with a cold beer after the display on Saturday.

The A380 – the first of 12 ordered by British Airways – had joined the Red Arrows above RAF Lyneham before heading over Royal Wootton Bassett en-route to the airshow.

Senior first officer Peter Nye was on the flight deck of the £270m jumbo jet.

He said: “It was a very British celebration. A lot of work has gone into planning the display and I’m told it was quite a spectacle. It was wonderful to see so many people watching.”

The Red Arrows took part in another joint display yesterday with the RAF’s Airbus A400M transporter, due to enter service in 2015.

The best of British theme also included the Reds Arrows’ Squadron Leader Mike Ling meeting George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, the last surviving Dambuster.

The 70th anniversary of the raid on the Nazi’s power supply in the Ruhr Valley was commemorated in the sky with a flypast by an Avro Lancaster and a modern Tornado GR4, both from the legendary 617 Squadron whose pilots carried out the mission.