I wonder how many people they carry at present? Just happened to notice there's one just about to arrive at Heathrow from Dubai. Due in at 11:40 but slightly early and over LEGOLAND as I type.

That's something I wondered about all the airlines, considering they've been trying to get as many seats into a plane as possible, and now the vast majority are parked up. I came across an article on the BBC website (published back in April) with a very interesting line:

In the two-metre theory, four passengers need 26 seats

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article...t-flying-again

Regarding Emirates, their policy is "vacant seats are placed between individual passengers or family groups", but it doesn't clarify how that works in terms of passengers in front and behind. Even if you just skipped every other seat (less than 1 metre) left to right and front to back, you'd end up with only 50% capacity.

As for flights, according to FlightGlobal, Emirates are operating 4 A380s a day out of Heathrow. It must be a surreal experience for people living around large airports to have them so quiet.

It's very noticeable as we're directly under one of the main exit routes (and sometimes approach) though not that close so they're typically up around 6-8000 ft here.

I've also noticed more A350s around, don't recall any earlier in the year.

Not sure what it's like elsewhere but here near Thiefrow it's all fairly quiet again, apart from the usual suspects.

Around coffee time I heard a really noisy one and inevitably it was a Chinese A330 heading for a city in China I'm not all familiar with.

Then just now a REALLY loud one and it was a cargo 747 heading East and much lower than the usual passenger jets, so presumably full of something?

I live under the flight path to Belfast International....never going to win prizes for the busiest airport in the UK...by a long shot!
However it is surreal how quiet that has even become of late.

With the exception of a couple of cargo flights I think there is poss 1-2 Easyjet a day to London.

We used to have a number of sizeable airport maintenance contracts back in the noughties.....thankfully we don't have them now...would be twiddling our thumbs if we did!

Just had an F-15 fly over, which is quite unusual. Heading South East.

There's a lot of Hawk trainers around off North Wales and one looped down over Devon and Cornwall recently, maybe an exercise?

There's not been any fast jet activity round here for ages actually which is why the single F-15 stood out. It wasn't on the usual training flight path either (which is North of the house), but appeared to be heading somewhere different.

TodAys is the regular Thursday War off Plymouth. Often use Hawks. F15 though?

I did think F15's were retired by now TBH.