Flightradar goings-on

[TentEntWenTyfOur]

I'm following UAE7TR from Dubai to Gatwick. It is currently flying towards Birmingham instead of Gatwick.

Anyone any ideas what's happening with that one?

I love FlightRadar and ADSB Exchange and all the rest and have learned (directly or indirectly) so much about aircraft from following them.

This is a video of a weather balloon that manages to capture an Airbus A319 passing overhead at 38,000 feet. Careful if you have headphones in - it's pretty loud! . It's interesting to hear how loud they are and what they sound like close up. Can't say I've ever heard an A319 going over at that height but some of the larger aircraft (e.g. Dreamliner, Airbus A330) are very audible even at those heights.

I didn't take this video but like visiting pretty much the same spot to see planes coming in to land at Heathrow. This is an A380 emerging from a misty gloom, coming in almost overhead https://www.tiktok.com/@lifeabroad1/video/7194889475959295237 (they're flying a lot slower than when they're at cruising height, so while very loud it's not ear-splitting to be ~150 feet below).

Heh well timed - I heard a plane-whooshing sound in the sky and see that this A330 has just gone over my house in Greenwich at 41,000 feet https://www.flightradar24.com/HYS102/379295be

Jo

@SallyForf Thank you - I’d forgotten about that one!

I see the drone FORTE13 is over Poland doing its thing, it used to be visible on FR but I haven’t seen it for ages.

Ooh, FORTE13 is on FR again

For anyone else nerdy enough to be interested:

It's a fascinating "Flight Radar" is a dream for whiling away the time, they're all there & recently I was following that three year cruise that couldn't depart from Belfast for three months, Cruise Radar

I remember when Obama was here years ago & helicopter flew over my home at the time in a place not too far from where I live now & the NOISE

I'm used to S&R helicopters & the Garda one flying over but this was unreal, thought my windows were going to give way

Russians are in our waters & airspace a lot , I missed the sonic boom sadly because I'm on the east coast

Trump flew over my house a few years ago leaving London to go elsewhere and the noise woke me up from a pregnancy nap. He was on a U.K. visit.
SO noisy!

He doesn't like his presence to be overlooked, does he?!

Hi..

For info the grey ground vehicles aren’t always fire trucks..there are a few quite a few Ground Operations vehicles that run around the active parts of airports doing things like runway inspections and bird scaring that are set up to be visible on groundmapping radar at some major airports (very useful for safety reasons, especially in bad visibility) and that can mean they are also visible on the amateur tracking sites..

As far far as the mil being visible or not concerned, it’s the usual story which I’ve bored people with before:

if they are in airspace where there’s a chance of conflicting with civilian traffic they may choose to be visible electronically,

if they are off in military only airspace (e.g.
parts of the North Sea, some of the weapons ranges) they’ll possibly be using an encrypted transponder mode that means they will not be visible electronically to civilian ATC.

and at of course at low level especially in rural areas Flightradar and the other tracking sites lack receiver coverage so nobody shows up on those sites regardless of whether they are civilian or military.

Nope. I was so cross 🤣

@fashionqueen0123 ah pregnancy naps.. I miss those days @TentEntWenTyfOur 😆

Wow - I never imagined I'd see a Flightradar thread on Mumsnet! This is awesome 😎 it's one of my guilty nerdy pleasures!

I created a accout on FlightRadar24 a few months ago but tbh I forgot about it until seeing this thread.

Did you all know you can apply for a free receiver to help them map the air traffic?
They seem to give out 30 /50 but I'm not sure if that in total or per month / year .
If you get one they send you all the stuff you need to set it up and give you a business class plan for free so you can see alsorts.

I haven't got one ( dont really want one) so I don't know what else it entails.

There's been a few threads on MN over the years, and is originally how I found out about Flightradar in the first place.

Next time it's really windy and there are loads of flights being diverted, there will probably be a thread about it on here somewhere.🙂

@TentEntWenTyfOur Hah! Those parcel planes are big birds. We're 10 minutes from Gatwick and you definitely know about it when one of those goes overhead 😂

@TentEntWenTyfOur I bet they are! We are on a flight path for some cargo routes, but not that close to an airport. I bet you don't half hear those when they're coming in to land!

My little boy and Iove a bit of FlightRadar. We look up the planes we can see either landing or taking off when we're queuing to go into school. He can recognise them from a distance now 😂

'Red nose, mummy. That's a 'weegion!'

We always used to get a plane think it was FedEx going over about 11pm. We are not far from Heathrow though

Another Flightradar fan here.

If you want to be (or already are) a bit more geeky, there's a couple of interesting websites I've found over the years - both with interesting maps.

One is https://nats-uk.ead-it.com/cms-nats/opencms/en/uas-restriction-zones/#Dronesafe_Map
which shows where the use of drones are restricted. That includes Sandringham, Highgrove, and Raymill House. Drones are also restricted over prisons.

Another is https://notaminfo.com/ukmap - a bit complicated to begin with, but you can deselect any of the "NOTAM details" and select various options from the dropdown list under "Airspace details". There's a permanent danger area around Weston-on-the-Green, north of Oxford, but only to FL120. Wonder what that could be?

That’s lovely 😁 Little kids are so good at learning things like this. He’ll know all the aircraft types and liveries soon!

@hoteltango

There's a permanent danger area around Weston-on-the-Green, north of Oxford, but only to FL120. Wonder what that could be?

Sounds like D129, a very busy parachuting training area.

(I’m burning the midnight oil)

Just in case anyone is mystified by “FL120” in the above, that’s not 120 feet, it’s “Flight Level 120” (FWIW spoken on the radio as “one-two-zero,” not “a hundred and twenty” ) which, roughly speaking converts to about 12,000 feet Amsl, plus or minus, depending on atmospheric pressure on the day.

The Flight Levels system is the standard for height keeping/height separation at altitude but I’ll leave the explanation for the link at the bottom, I’m not keen to get into altimeters and altimetry at this time of the AM:

https://www.meteoswiss.admin.ch/weather/weather-and-climate-from-a-to-z/flight-levels.html#:~:text=The%20flight%20levels%20correspond%20to,the%20pressure%20surface%201%2C013.25%20hPa.

Going on MN when you can’t sleep at 2am is never a good idea. Now I’ve found a new rabbit hole I’ve never explored: Flight Radar!

This is really interesting! I’ve taken a seaplane sightseeing flight in a remote area on holiday before and often scan the area on FR and never see any of those types of planes.

I had always wondered if the company was flying with transponders off somehow, but they do fly at very low levels and it is VERY remote, so perhaps that’s why!

One of the top 10 at the moment is identified as being a bird control vehicle at Amsterdam.
I wonder if it's goose migration season?