Flight Radar fans. Ryanair, flight to nowhere...

[PonyosGreenBucket]

Anyone seen this over Manchester.

Landed with no destination only to loop round and land. Looks like its landing anyway. Down to 3k feet

Sorry, took off with no destination.

Has landed now.

No idea but guessing maybe Pilot training? Or repositioning to park properly?

Pilots have to keep their license valid, so need to do a set amount of take-offs and landings to enable this

This has been covered elsewhere but sorry I'm too lazy to dig through the various flightradar threads - in a nutshell:

Flying the aircraft even on a short hop on a routine basis seems to be Ryanair's tactic for avoiding the costs involved in the maintenance work that would be involved to get aircraft back to flying if there were left for weeks/months on end without being run, systems powered, that sort of thing.

It's also a method of keeping pilots "recent" - doing the legally requited number of take-offs and landings in a specific period..if they don't fly there's then cost to the required retraining.

Ryanair have put their pilots on 'standby' with no pay for at least 3 months. The flights you saw were maintenance (and iirc also unpaid) for planes and pilots. I know this because DS1 is a pilot for then

There were a couple of these at 1am too.

Ah Thankyou!

What is this sort of helicopter doing?

As mentioned in another thread, Googling the registration, in this case G-PICU, often gives a bit of a clue as to what might be going on..

www.helis.com/database/cn/46856/

So I guess all the aircraft will go for a short flight a bit like taking the car for a run to charge the battery.

G-PICU is a children's air ambulance based at Oxford airport, usually used to transport sick children distances that would be a long journey by road ambulance.

Anyone know why some planes are light blue?

Light blue ones are tracked by satellite.

Ah! Thanks :)

So I guess all the aircraft will go for a short flight a bit like taking the car for a run to charge the battery.

One for an engineer, but basically, I suspect that's pretty much is yes, get things like electrical systems powered up and running at operating temperature, and stuff like hydraulic fluid circulating through actuators etc.....

From what I'm hearing either that or specific maintenance to moth ball the airframe and then more maintenance to "un mothball" when the aircraft is going to be used again.

Thanks notimagain I'm new to all this!

Just spotted this one over Birmingham - Ravenair do all sorts - flying school, aerial surveys ... I guess it's the latter here

When I click on some flights it says N/A. Anyone know why?

I'm just tracking/watching a flight from Cairo which seems to be going in odd loops over Doncaster/Sheffield. It has no end destination. Just says N/A as above for @Twospaniels

Which is the best flight radar tracker app (yes, I know this is probably not the best time to start but at least I have the time for this now) We have 2-3 planes over a day it seems now. Just wondering who/where.

When I click on some flights it says N/A. Anyone know why?

The information is Not Available:

The aircraft data transmissions that flight radar is eavesdropping on don't generally contain information such as departure point/destination, that's held in the flight plan ATC and the crew have ..

As I understand it Flight radar works by comparing callsign/flight number with a data base of flight numbers/callsigns and gets the departure/destination from there..if it "sees" a callsign or flight number it cannot match with the database or other external sources ( and there are a lot of non standard flights around at the moment) it may well display "N/A" (not available)

The one I was watching says Liverpool to N/A but I think it will just be returning to Liverpool after doing aerial surveying - so maybe that's why it's N/A? Because it's not actually heading to a destination iyswim?

That I guess returning to point of origin might be a possibility sometimes, but if you look at a lot of non-airline traffic (biz jets, helicopters, etc) that are very definitely going from "A" to somewhere else you'll often see "N/A"..

It just so happens as I type this (1930 UK time) this there's an Embraer Phenom 300 "E5PP", probably out of Tallin, heading westbound over the North sea in controlled airspace. It's tagged as going from "N/A" to "N/A".

A flight plan will have been filed with ATC for that flight but for whatever reason flight radar doesn't have access to that info, it doesn't recognise the flight as being one in it's database with a recurring flight number or callsign, so the system has to display origin and departure as "N/A".