What's going on in the air?

[HPsauce]

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.