Flight radar tonight

[liquidsquidli]

Why are they so many military flights over Lincolnshire and north sea ?

theres many typhoons and 5 canadian air force planes

The weird thing is, on Flight Radar, RAF Valley, the Lakes, and the Mach loop are always quiet - they v rarely turn transponders on there. But in the East coast you can see jets tracking almost daily. Wonder why?

[speculative ramblings]

Some of that might be down to local procedures…given airspace structure there’s more chance of military traffic off the East coast interacting with civil traffic (lots of helicopters going to/from the rigs, there’s a least one major airway running east/west across the North Sea).

OTOH Wales, certainly from south of Angelsey until just north of the Brecon Beacons, tends to be slightly more military only, certainly in daylight hours, so maybe there’s less requirement for military aircraft to be electronically visible to all and sundry, so just perhaps in that part of the world they generally operate their transponders only in an encrypted mode (though that would create problems with what civvie traffic that might be in that part of the world).

The other issue is that unlike the east coast there’s lots of lovely mountainous terrain in Wales that can mask transponders from ground based receivers (and probably not many receivers) so even if the mil were transmitting openly the signal might not get picked up and fed to Flight radar.

Maybe somebody can volunteer to sit alongside the Mach Loop with an ADS receiver and see if they can get a signal from one of the fly bys.

[/speculative ramblings]

Sorry but dare I add that Flightradar seems to suppress more military aircraft than some of the other trackers and sometimes it’s worth doing a compare and contrast with the likes of the ADS-B site.

That said there are simply times and places where the mil don’t want an audience and they make it so….

Ours fly so low over the river our house shakes, that doesn't show up on the radar. Snowdonia is great for training, mountains, lakes, they can drop down fast then rise again and again.

Two planes went over earlier following the usual river route. Unfortunately low cloud so I couldn't see them . Both Beech

Gosh they were low.
Do you think they were doing a reccy over Morfa Dyfrryn beach?😎

For info for a couple of reasons the Barometric height number as shown on Flightradar is pretty much meaningless when it come actual height above the ground of the low level military stuff rattling around the countryside…

They’ll possibly have been aiming by eyeball to no closer than 250 feet to ground level.

notimagain I didn't know that, thanks.

I've seen them below the hill on the other side of the river from my kitchen. An impressive sight.