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