Plane / Planes / Aircraft / Aeroplane / Airplane appreciation

KC-135 above Oxfordshire last week.

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Yes! I picked it up on my adsb receiver as it flew back to base in Spain. Awesome that you posted a photo.

Wonder what it was up to? Seems to spend a bit of time doing loops around Gibraltar.

Doing loops sounds like usual business for a tanker. Gibraltar seems a likely spot to refuel aircraft between the US and Middle East.

Lots of them at Mildenhall, which according to wikipedia is their only permanent base in Europe.

I picked it up on my adsb receiver

What are the benefits to using one of these against Flightradar24. Do you mount aerial on the roof or in the loft?

Do you listen aswell? is so on what? that is good for subarban situations.

tia

There are a few perks compared to just using flightradar24.

FR24 delays its feed by a few minutes to comply with various laws so its always a little out of sync. If you operate your own station you have access to realtime data. I'm an FR24 contributor, I feed my data to them and they give me "professional" access to their site in return. All of their data is crowd sourced by amateurs like me. Here's my FR24 contributor page:

https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/Stonehedge#stats-122350

I listen to some stuff. Not so much airband, its pretty boring most of the time. I'm a lapsed radio amateur (license expired over ten years ago) with an interest in aviation and satellite communications so I use a scanner and SDR radio for various hobby level experiments. I grabbed a few packets from the ISS as it flew over a bit earlier.

The nerd in me is strong. Half of the fun of being a radio amateur is building your own rigs and antennas and seeing how far you can communicate, sometimes using atmospheric conditions to your advantage. Back when I was active, I think my record was a contact from London to Kiev, bouncing a signal off the troposphere. Which leads me on to why I have an ADSB/MLAT setup.

Running my own ADSB station scratches my continual itch to build new antennas and see how efficient I can make a setup. ADSB operates on 1090 MHZ which presents its own challenges for receiving. Signals can only really be line of site so you get a pretty good idea what your maximum theoretical range is using a few simple calculations. For me, setting my ADSB up to receive the best possible range of aircraft from a 2nd floor flat window was a good learning experience.

^^ tldr, I tend to get on better with maths, machines and making stuff than I do with humans. Which might help a few people on here understand why I am often slow to understand other people's emotions. Its not just because I'm a dick :D

Can relate to most of that.

From memory that 130 is based about 20 miles north of Gibralter so that makes perfect sense.

Thanks, and helpful. My interest stems from pre internet days and long night shifts. Up here in Leeds we are sat under the europe / US flight path Upper Blue something? it was a long while ago. We could follow on radio and watch contrails as they went overhead in the early mornings. Especially interested when they are asking for short cuts off their plans and seeing them turn off. On clear mornings we could catch them from above Manchester and over towards Nth Lincolnshire. We had the maps and could see them turn over the radio point.

As well as the ATC calls could recall the airline calls, crew asking for extra water or calling blocked toilets before getting to the destination.

Maybe my experience of listening to civil airband is so negative because I've always lived less than 20 miles from Heathrow under final approach....the chat gets very procedural by the point of the flight!

Can just about pick up the Heathrow ground operations and tower frequencies where we are. That gets slightly more interesting. But not much.

A surprise outing in a fighter jet unnerved one defence company executive so much he accidentally ejected himself while flying at over 500km/h

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/man-accidentally-ejects-himself-from-fighter-jet-during-surprise-flight

That journalism belongs in epic fail.

C17 accompaniment for this evenings ride.

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Up here in Leeds we are sat under the europe / US flight path Upper Blue something? it was a long while ago.

Yeah, they haven’t had colours for a long time, and UB1 disappeared about 15 years ago. It looks like this up there now:

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Yeah, they haven’t had colours for a long time, and UB1 disappeared about 15 years ago

Thanks, there is a lot that has changed, even the markers/beacons have moved and been added to. Presumably the rise in aircraft travel required more routes.

The beacons (physical VOR/DME sites) are actually the same as they always were - in this area those are Ottringham (OTR), Trent (TNT), Manchester (MCT), Pole Hill (POL), Wallasey (WAL), as well as Gamston (GAM) which isn’t shown on upper airspace charts. B1/UB1 used to run west from Ottringham to Wallasey.

What has changed are many of the Reporting Points, the five letter name codes that dominate the chart. These are defined either as a radial and distance from a VOR/DME beacon, or increasingly as a GNSS point.

With GNSS taking over from ground-based navigation infrastructure, the old VOR/DME beacons are gradually being decommissioned, there will be very few of them left in 10 years time.

There is nothing in your post that I didn't find deeply satisfying. That is all.

For some reason years, I had in my memory thought OTR was south of the river, knowing full well its north, having been brought up 10miles away

agreeing whole heartedly

Just seen an A400M (I think) fly over, very very low. Was majestic.

Not sure where it was headed as no airbases around here, possibly good wood??? Assume it needs a pretty big runway?

Hoping it’ll be going back the other way soon, camera ready.

https://planefinder.net/flight/RRR824

Assume it needs a pretty big runway?

2500 feet of firm dirt or grass will do.

If he can't tell a C-17 from an A400M, his posting privilege in this thread will be revoked 🙂