A couple of hours ago a friend calls & asks “is that plane going to crash or something” & tells me there is an aircraft circling overhead, which has been doing so for about 40 minutes.
I go & have a look & see the vapor trails from an aircraft flying about 30,000 feet, which continues to fly the same orbit for about another 10 minutes. I would say it was flying slightly faster than your average airliner & a set of binoculars showed it was a large bird with four podded engines. I live quite far from anywhere that will take a bird like this, so I am assuming it is on an excesses of some sort. When it completed its pattern, it broke of to do another same sized orbit to the west, then flew straight through its original orbit to do another single one to the east - like the infinity sign, but with another circle, following this it cleared of in a straight southerly direction.
My first thought was an exercise involving refueling, but there were no other A/C in the area & the UK doesn’t have any wing pod engined refueling assets anyway (although it could have been foreign). It wasn’t a Sentry, as it had no dish.
So I do a bit of thinking & start to wonder if it is a USAF Rivet Joint doing some demo work for the RAF - as far as I understand the UK are now committed to three Rivet Joints.
Anyone familiar enough with the Rivet Joint to agree / deny that this is the sort of pattern they may at times fly?
Could have been military or civilian. If traffic was congested air traffic control could have set it in an area to orbit while awaiting landing clearance. It could have been a military aircraft holding waiting the arrival of other aircraft.
On a couple of redeployments, we had to orbit for periods of time waiting the arrival of the fighter we were to escort back across the pond home to the states. We orbited once for an hour waiting on the A-10s we were to drag home and refuel along the way. That was a l o n g flight. F-15/F-16 weren’t so bad unless one of them had problems taking on fuel…requiring them to tank often.
It could have even been a jet up on a maintenance inspection hop. Orbiting while the crew and any mechanics checked her out. Gulfstream flies predelivery and post repair sorties out of here all the time. They fly in big looping orbits or cross country.
Here are a couple tracking examples of two such flights. Notice in the first one the figure eight orbit over Iowa. Apparent they amended their IFR clearance and had to wait while it was approved. ATC set them up in an holding orbit. The second one shows a flight returning after having flown some lazy loops over Upper Michigan.
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Typically when they return they fly several approaches in various configurations to check the aircraft’s systems and avionics. Here is one flying a missed approach (note gear are up) after this they flew out and made an ILS approach to a different runway and called it a day.
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You win the Pathfinder Award, Hawk…
The Figure 8 orbit is over Kansas…
Weren’t a Second Loot-tenant by any chance, were you?
So it was, I was seeing a small image without my glasses and had only had one cup of coffee.
possibly an RC-135 from RAF mildenhall? it would have a light grey underneath with longish black nose, as im local i’ll see if i can find out if they were out and about today
That would be appreciated - I suppose it could have been RC-135’s or KC-135’s (never thought on that one).
KC-135 would appear quite dark grey and the RC’s quite light, if your interested join Touchdown-News@yahoogroups.com its a news group that keeps you up dated on movements are mildenhall as well as news on a/c movement and news in general