Flight radar

[confusedlots]

I clearly know there’s a war going on, but there are 4 Air Force planes flying east over the top of Northern Ireland at the minute, all very close to
each other, is that to be expected? Just all seems very close. I spotted a large, noisy plane around midnight a few nights ago on a flight path close to us which isn’t a usual flight path and looked up Flightradar out of interest to find out it was an Air Force plane, and I guess it has surprised me a bit that’s it’s all so close to us. Guess I should just stop looking at it.

Bit of an odd flight path. Also there's a Hercules coming over from St John's...

There have been more about recently...
But aye there seems a fair few the night. One just north west of Shetland RAF

They have been flying over Devon and Cornwall for days with air to air refuelling going on. They are all tanker planes refuelling fighter planes on the way back and forth from the US to the Middle East. We were woken up at the crack of dawn by an enormity rumbling noise as one flew directly overhead refuelling a bomber. Honestly it was scary the whole house felt like it was vibrating with the noise.

We hear them almost every day over us. North Wilts. Most of them aren’t broadcasting who they are, but they fly quite low. We aren’t too far from Fairford.

There's a couple of KC-135 tankers that have been off to the northwest of Ireland, both ex Mildenhall, looks like on their way back there now so they may have been refuelling something or things coming across the Atlantic from the US..that's not been that unusual recently.

There's a USAF Hercules about 100 miles behind them now...that might be linked to the tankers, dunno, and a Canadian C-17 behind that probably doing it's own independent thing.

It's all fairly normal in the context of events in the Middle East

For info a couple of tankers (KC-135) inbound from the Atlantic again as I post (1905 uk time).

Rumours doing the rounds that some F-22s are going back to the US and reports of A-10s are coming the other way so the activity may be associated with that.

A couple of big, noisy planes have just flown over north Wilts. Not showing up on FlightRadar.

And now two more.

KnickerlessParsons - no idea really, but given the proximity to Fairford, could well have a connection to that.

Absolutely.

Tonight there appears to be a private aircraft just going up and down in straight lines just north of Belfast. Never spotted anything like it before, what could it be doing?

That sort of pattern is usually associated with some sort of mapping or surveying and the aircraft type (Reims- Cessna Caravan) is one often used for that role.

How do you work out what type of ircrdt they are

Click on the aircraft on your screen and somewhere on therr (LHS on an iPad, at the bottom on the phone app) you should get an info panel which if you scroll it contains lots.of details, one being the aircraft type

Thanks 🙂🙂