What's going on in the air?
 

Not sure that many of you are interested, but as we live relatively near Heathrow and are under many flightpaths (normally) it's interesting to see what's going on now. Basically not a lot, relatively speaking.

First thing I've noticed, apart from the dramatic reduction in flights, is that we can now hear individual panes taking off from Heathrow, nearly 20 miles away!
If I hear a planes engines and check it online (Flightradar24 is good) it's often still on the runway within the airport boundary!

And I've really got good at identifying the planes from the engine noise. A 4-engine 747 is now so distinctive, and all the A380s are long gone.

Basically there are 3 types of plane flying now, almost no others:
Daytime: Boeing 777 and Airbus A350. With the very occasional Dreamliner thrown in.
Nighttime: As above but largely outnumbered by 747s, all cargo variants.

We're also under the flightpath from Northolt/London to Chequers so get quite a lot of low-flying helicopters. And not all of them are showing/registered with a known flight path. Seen quite a few Chinooks go over very low that are just not visible online.....

But nothing will ever compare to the aerial armada that flew up the valley when George Bush visited Tony Blair at Chequers back in 2001. :eek:

Funny enough, I'm sitting in my study looking out at what should be the final turn to line up for landing at Belfast International (BFS/EGAA)
Total lack of aircraft at the moment, the evening should have the usual steady stream of regional Easyjets/Ryanairs.

Currently we only get 2-3 cargo aircraft and a few military aircraft in for a gas-n-go before they head transatlantic.....

Enjoying the silence!

I would imagine it's very noticeable how different it is.

I flew back from Amsterdam last week and both airports were very empty and surreal, to say the least.

I've also noticed a dramatic drop in the aircraft overhead. I'd normally see half a dozen in the air at any point when I go for a walk at lunchtime. Now there is just one in an hour - 4 engines, heading across the Atlantic. Nothing small heading in to Exeter since Flybe is toast. No military activity at all in the last month or so - normally there's quite a lot round here.

Typically, living on a hill in the middle of nowhere with no light pollution, it was cloudy when SpaceX launched the second batch of Starlink so I didn't see any of that :(

I did notice one fascinating phenomenon from the single daily flight a couple of weeks ago when the weather was bright but a few clouds around - the exhaust plume from the engines was clearly visible as a dark trail in the sky. I watched it separate from the vapour trail and drop steadily down and pass through some clouds until it eventually dispersed underneath them. I've never seen that before so I think it must be to do with the air being so much cleaner now. I thought it was an optical illusion or confirmation bias so I stopped watching it for a few minutes and then was easily able to spot it again. I guess normally this soot just blends in to the polluted atmosphere so is invisible.

Ref the Chinooks, as a london based worker I was told many years ago that the flights over London were a routine changeover of an SAS deployment kept in London for anti-terror response

Suspect other flights for training etc are similarly ‘under the radar’?

We use flightradar at work - if nothing else my aviation colleagues are nearly all plane buffs!

I have a fleet of Raspberry Pi computers, and three of them run PiAware in conjunction with an SDR (software defined radio USB dongle with aerial) which listens out for ADS-B transmissions on 1090MHz. These are geographically located in NW London, Surrey and Somerset so I normally get to see a fair few planes on a good day but with the Covid-19 lock-down, traffic has dropped to about 10% to 15%, which is indeed a huge reduction.

Monitoring from Crewkerne has the best range, with planes sometimes transmitting ADS-B signals from over 150 miles away. NW London has around 60-70 miles range and mine in Surrey a paltry 40-50 miles range. I've seen 'USAF 100th Refuelling Wing' a few days ago, and have also picked up FAA flights (Fleet Air Arm). Helicopters tend to be a bit limited in terms of info broadcast, especially so with anything registered to the UK Police for obvious reasons. I've also seen a helicopter registered to 'UK Home Office'. The majority of planes in the sky seem to be cargo (CargoLux/DHL et al).

(data feeds from my 3 Pi computers get sent back to FlightAware servers for inclusion on their website)

If anyone is remotely interested in doing the same, it will probably cost around £80-£100 to get one going.

Just looked and there's an Atlas Air 747-45E cargo plane almost over you as I post, heading from Norfolk (Virginia) to Frankfurt.
I guess you're not on the major transatlantic routes as they're mostly further north.

I'll miss that one as its a bit early. There should be one heading West at about 13:00 which is the only one I see now. I'm curious to see what that is and where its going if most of the transatlantic routes are further North, since there isn't very much else West of here! South America maybe?

Slightly O/T, but I'm more curious about what's happening to the sky, as for the past seven weeks here in Northern Ireland (Londonderry) it's been a strange blue colour, something we're not used to seeing :)

Seriously though, the last time it rained here was the day before St. Patrick's day, the 16th March. Of the 42 days since, we've had three continuous days of total cloud cover with literally some spots of rain in the evening (not enough to wash the dust off the car) over those three days. The rest of the time has been 80-100% clear skies. We don't even get this sort of weather in the middle of summer.

In related news, I filled up the thirsty bus with a tiny fuel tank today (S5) for the first time since mid-March.....

It's the only car we've used in recent weeks and done a sum total of 220 miles (most of which was a round trip to hospital for an appointment!)

It has rained a fair bit down in the South East corner of England over the last week or so, but we are very much noticing the drop off in aircraft traffic overhead. Although we're no longer on the flightpath for Gatwick, we're still used to seeing planes at reasonable altitudes on approach/departure, which we're just not getting.

About the only thing we hear now is the local police chopper and the occasional private aircraft (which are presumably doing their allowed engine run flights to keep things working, rather than off on a jolly!)

Be interesting to see if our political 'masters' sense an opportunity to push for a greener economy in general as we come out the other side. one suspects they'll just want to get back to business as usual and we'll be back to trying to elicit why allowing sky writing is somehow critical to aviation.......

I think 'business as usual' is going to be very different post-covid. C-suite execs are seeing their business still working just fine while their very expensive office buildings are sitting there empty. We moved 5000 people to working from home overnight, and everything carried on as normal. Yes, some people are not enjoying working from home, but thats likely because it was forced on them and they can't even get away from it in lockdown, but I know most of my office-based colleagues are very much enjoying getting up an hour later because they don't have to commute every morning.

Is rush hour going to be a thing any more? Are people going to be clamouring to get back in to the office once this is over? I suspect not.

I filled up the A6 on the Monday before lockdown (just before oil prices crashed obviously). It'll do 700 miles on a tank so I probably won't need to fill up again until August :rolleyes:

My elder son is rather looking forwards to getting back to the office, and he's based in one of the big towers in Canary Wharf!
That said, he's extremely busy and can commute by car (parks in Billingsgate) much quicker than public transport.
Not sure his wife is so keen though, she works next to St Pauls Cathedral and usually goes by bus, though can walk (long trek).

Had a look at what's flown over you (MJ) around 1pm and there was a 747 (KLM cargo) heading from Miami to Amsterdam but some way north and to the south a TUI Dreamliner going from Bournemouth to the Dominican Republic! Maybe a rescue flight?
Apart from that some unidentified planes from QinetiQ (Empire Test Pilots School) are around the area, probably out of Boscombe Down.

I'm not hearing anything that would entice me to jump on a train for the hour plus commute into central London - the vague nonsense about asking companies to stagger staff working hours won't achieve a sufficient reduction in peak hours demand on crammed trains on the Brighton mainline. They run massively overloaded most of the time, pre-lockdown.

It will be employees turning up on platforms and seeing rammed carriages and making the call that they don't want to be one of those sheep trying to squeeze on as well.

The tech to wfh isn't perfect, but when it doesn't work you can now just shrug your shoulders and go do something else if you can't connect to a meeting.

I'm also enjoying not spending £4.5k on a train ticket

Novelty arrival at Heathrow! Heard a large loud plane a few minutes ago on the approach track to Heathrow just a couple of miles south of us.
An A380 of China Southern Airlines from Guangzhou, it's just landed (early).

Followed in by a more common BA 777 from Peking.

I have also noticed that the skies are mostly clear these days, with proper blue colour. And I have been observing the sky every day since July 1st 2017, when I was astounded by the lines in the sky from airplanes - probably geoengineering. All in all I have 500+ photos documenting this phenomenon.

http://forum.a8parts.co.uk/attachmen...1&d=1588798476

An Amsterdam to Sao Paulo passed over Barnstaple Cross just after 10:30pm.
Slightly odd as that isn't the great circle direct route.... (that's over northern France)

I live under a flight path for Bristol airport and it's noticeably quieter now. I think the last plane I saw and heard was what looked like an A400M a few days ago.

I've been working from home now and it's much nicer not having to commute by train and having more time with the family. I'm missing driving the 8 though but keeping it going with the odd click & collect! Need to fit those new grommets from MJ soon.

Not so much a novelty now, but a rarity. Excluding scrapped, ordered and not built yet, there are 236 A380s that have been put in storage. That only leaves 5 currently flying, three of which are operated by China Southern Airlines.

The numbers are staggering. There's a short video on YouTube giving some insight into the current situation. Roughly 24,000 planes worldwide, with 16,000 being put into storage!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpIs8Y9vgSs

Cost wise, it costs something like US$30,000 per month to put them in storage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7li6ozxo-rQ

That aligns roughly with the stats you can look at on Fightradar24. They say that worldwide commercial flights in April were down at just above 25% of last years figures, though they are now slowly rising.
I guess if you've got a plane you use it 100% or not at all. :rolleyes:

The quietest day in the air (for a very very long time) was 12th April, but that was also Easter Sunday.
It was also our 45th wedding anniversary and we were supposed to be on Iona and Staffa (seeing Fingal's cave). Which obviously we weren't..... :-(

That same A380 just left Heathrow going back to China, flew straight over our house at 22:55, very loud!

Just heard a very loud plane going over, it was another A380 heading for China!

Oddly there was an almost-normal level of flights over me on Wednesday lunchtime - 2 in the air and 6 vapour trails. Yesterday, down to 1 of each, so a slightly odd blip.

Also one very unusual flight path which was heading just South of West, then turned almost 90 degrees and headed due South. Never seen that before.

Oh and an Apache helicopter too, which is quite common round here. Unarmed so not very exciting, but flying quite low.

I've noticed a fair few vapour trails in recent days, I think it's atmospheric conditions high up, almost all planes with trails are near or above 40,000ft.

As for helicopters our regular/irregular low-flying Chinook went over late yesterday evening, not showing up on any trackers of course....

The weirdest one I spotted the other day on Flightradar24 was a tangled track just off Brittany that went on for nearly 2 hours!
Turned out to be a Douglas A4 Skyhawk flying out of a small French airport called Lorient-Lann-Bihoué Airport but owned by a big American military corporation that I can't recall the name of. I think it's also a French military airfield too. So heavens only knows what it was up to!

And todays novelty was an RAF Airbus A400M, just went over very low and very loud heading West. Must have come out of Northolt and be keeping below the Heathrow Asian exit flight paths that usually go over us at around 10,000ft and climbing.
It's staying at around 2,000 ft heading towards Oxford.

Judging by the track, it's come all the way from Cyprus

Yup, just checked that, RAF Akrotiri, probably going to Brize Norton.
Odd route though..... :Confused:

The 747s going over high are very obvious, even at 40,000ft you can see the 4 separate contrails from the engines.
More intriguing are the 3-engine freighters, I didn't even know they were still around. Seen a fair few MD-11s (DC-10 upgraded basically) going over. Looking them up it seems only about 200 were ever built and around half are still flying! And even a few DC-10s apparently.

I've just detected what I think is an aerial survey plane of some description, operating at 13,000 ft and performing some very straight north-south flying skills.

PH-SVY - Piper PA-31T Cheyenne 2
Slagboom & Peeters Aerial Photography

Rather quickly followed by an RAF flight from Brize Norton

UK Royal Air Force Transport 2274
RRR2274 / ZZ331

http://bergkamp.uk.to:8080 (if anyone's interested, runs 24x7)

Came from Germany - Munster/Osnabruck.

Aircraft type (BE20) Beech B200 Super King Air Registration D-IWAW according to FR24. https://www.flightradar24.com/DIWAW/24962951

Ah no! That's another one...…,

The other evening, Saturday IIRC, a very low-flying 4-prop military transport went over. Looked more likely to be a Hercules than an A400 though from its size.
It was heading West and definitely NOT showing up on any flight trackers..... :tuttut:

All quiet on the Northern front...
 

Even though Manchester is the UK's 3rd busiest airport, and I'm only 5 miles from it, I'm not seeing much action here - or maybe I'm just not skygazing enough :ROFL:

Had another Chinese A380 go over late this evening, heading out to Guangzhou! You really can tell the big 4-jets from the usual twins these days from the sound.
Though the Chinese A330s are unbelievably noisy! Do they use different engines or something?

And we've had the usual parade of "invisible" large military low-flyers through the week. …...

The A330 comes with one of three engines and there's three variants of the aircraft itself, so maybe one of those combo's is excessively noisy, to the extent that you can distinguish it from afar.

Its all very quiet down here too.

Being in Melbourne, we're not under many flightpaths, other than Auckland-(Perth)-Johannesburg, but we used to have a regular array of flights come over our place usually ML to Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington, LA, Sydney, Canberra, and a few other bits and bobs depending on winds and SID (Standard Instrument Departure) routes.

We see hardly anything now.

Qantas sent it's last 747-400 on an East Coast goodbye visit this week and was selling tickets for Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra (but not Melbourne, see below) joy flights. These were classed as commercial flights, so me and my mate (a Qantas LAME) were speculating that if the Mojave mothballed A380s don't return to service with Qantas (Which is possible, depending what happens post-Covid), the 747 will have outlasted it in Qantas commercial service!
Wouldnt that be an irony!

We were supposed to have restrictions ease a bit this month, with Qantas to restart normal domestic operations at about 30% capacity. But as Melbourne has returned into stage 3 Covid restrictions following a major outbreak (2nd wave If you like, except it was totally preventable), the flights haven't returned down here (outside of freight/postal/essential services).
Sydney is also experiencing a couple of outbreaks, so they may need to reimpose restrictions too.
Meanwhile, we're just waiting for numbers to drop again...

BA has also (finally) retired all it's 747s too. We still see the odd cargo 747 coming out of Heathrow as they're still quite low over us if turning to head East.

The others I spot are usually flying over high between Europe and North America. The really high 747s (up around 40,000 ft) are very easy to identify as the 4-engine contrail (when conditions create one) is totally obvious.

chinese 330's are fitted with CFM56 engines made by GE of the USA and Safran of france [ used to be called SNECMA I think ] ;other engines are available fo this aircraft

CFM56 is a 737-300/400 engine.
If its an older A330, it probably uses a GE CF6.
Very early high bypass engine design, highly developed but outdated now, which probably explains the noise.
The highest bypass ratio is only about 5:1, on modern engines this is now about 11:1 - bypass is how much air goes around the engine, instead of through it. The more air that bypasses the core, the quieter the engine (reduced thermal shock, reduced velocity differential and general noise insulation). It's also a measure of their efficiency.

Should have gone with the RR Trent!

The A330 is no spring chicken these days and the latest variants are "NEO" (New Engine Option).
Boeing just gives them a new dash number when they do the same thing (-400, -800, -Max!)

An RAF BAe146-200 just went over quite low; we see them regularly and they're usually invisible to tracker sites like Flightradar24, but this one wasn't.
It had come out of Heathrow though no destination on display. I think the RAF only have two and this was the convertible cargo/passenger (Quick-Change) one.

Weird couple of planes
 

Noticed a couple of odd names for planes overhead late last night, or to be more accurate, early this morning. First screenshot shows flight AMBUSH1 from my local Pi which apparently flew from Shipdham somewhere in Norfolk (there was also one alarmingly called MACHETE2 which I failed to capture), and the second screenshot from the distant Somerset Pi showing a fairly big increase in air traffic, noticeable over the last week when compared to the previous week.

Update: reference code of 43C287 revealed that it's registered as a Westland Puma HC2 helicopter