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

It took off from East of Malta so presumably off a carrier, it's one of these
Northrop Grumman RQ-4B Global Hawk

Yes, gone. I don't understand that.

It dropped off tracking a while ago (last few minutes Flightradar was displaying an estimated position based on last known track and ground speed).

Either it’s gone beyond the range of any of the receivers feeding Flightradar or the US don’t want anyone watching it anymore so have cut the feed, so to speak.

@LuluBlakey1 it just means it has turned its transponder off.

US must have realised it bed time for us and is doing us a favour :)

The squawk may now be off, it may have landed or they may have wondered why so many women in the UK are stalking it! If 'they' have switched off the squawk they don't want us to know something!

This is an interesting one.

The squawk- is that the transponder?

It is. There is one from Baghdad with no known destination heading to what looks like the same place.

@MyOtherProfile This one- or perhaps to the Lebanon

Strictly speaking the actual squawk is a four digit code that gets issued by ATC to allow them to identify an aircraft…

So at some point in a flight the pilots will be told, for example “squawk 4556” by whichever controller is handling the flight…that code then shows up in some form on their display to help them sort out which dot is which flight.

The actual transponder is the electronic box that communicates with ATC radar, and it is that into which thecode is entered (usually using little keyboard in the cockpit/on the flight deck).

I follow AIS sometimes to see who's fishing in our water. Last summer off Kent was the biggest ship a russian trawler with a processing plant. I was surprised just how big it was

Cham Wings - Syrian based airline, Damascus based.

Why would it have 'No known destination' from Baghdad?

Maybe for security reasons

That’s a Flightradar issue..(not uncommon), ATC and others will know.

Flightradar isn’t hooked up to all flightplan data that the air traffic centers get.
Becasue of that, and as I understand it FR gets the destination info by looking back in it’s own database and seeing if it can match flight numbers/callsigns to routes previously flown by those flights/callsigns..if there’s no match it states “No known destination”.

That can also cause problems if flights reroute or skip enroute stops … lots of really wierd stuff showed up during Covid when the freight operators were switching routes and/or overflying their usual stops..

I love flight radar. We have had Typhoon jets over South Wales circling for a few nights now. I wouldn’t mind a go in one of those, bet it is a wild ride, especially at night.

Just spotted Mad Arse. Maybe is it Madras and Mad arse from having too hot a madras?!

Was definitely a typhoon as it went over my house at some speed so must have been the wrong data.

I noticed that earlier yesterday, at which time there was also an RAF plane which looked like it'd flown out of Cyprus to near where it was at the time and then returned.

🤣🤣

That was an interesting night! Thank you very much to the regulars who are so generous in sharing their knowledge. It's fascinating reading all the explanations.

Morning…

For anyone still following things the highlight for the early risers is/was a pair of Typhoons trailing a tanker (a Voyager), advertised as flying Malta to Thumrait (Oman), as I post they are over Egypt.

No idea if the previously mentioned Global Hawk is still up there somewhere or finally got to bed….

Now I really must get something productive done with the rest of the day…

rubs hands together - a Bell Osprey just flew over my house (and then weirdly turned it's transponder off). Just around the M60 north Manchester. Made a hell of a racket :-D