x-ray wrote:
There was an item on the bbc news earlier showing how busy the air-freight companies are now. Some airlines have even taken the seats out of passenger planes and are using them as cargo planes.
Yes, one of my new Covid-19 toys is FlightRadar24, and very few planes passing overhead in east Fife, but when they do they seem to be cargo planes. Or at least that's the trans-atlantic flights - the only passenger planes seem to be domestic flights, like Aberdeen to EMA.
So when I'm out on my late night/early morning walks (difficult to tell if it's late night or early morning just now) I look up any plane I see/hear passing on my mobile
Or even if I'm browsing indoors and see a plane passing on the website I'll rush outdoors to see if I can spot it - luckily there's not many people around here, even when there's no lockdown
Anyway, the jets flying high overhead seem to be on all sorts of weird and wonderful routes, like one from Reykjavik to Liege a few hours ago, or the likes of Leipzig or Cologne to Cincinnati
And when the sky's clear it's not difficult to spot them, even though they tend to be flying at 35,000 to 40,000 feet, which is up to eight miles or so - that's the nearest I'll ever get to the eight-mile-high club
And not too difficult to spot them out over the North Sea at a distance of maybe 40 or 50 miles
A few nights ago, when it was really clear and dark, one went directly overhead en route to EMA.
I kept my eye on it, and when it finally disappeared I looked it up on FlightRadar, and it was pushing down almost level with Newcastle - something like 100 miles away
Which might sound implausible, but on a really clear night you can easily see the TV transmitter at Durris (between Aberdeen and Balmoral Castle) from various places in east Fife, and that's up to 55 miles away
In fact I can get a TV picture from the Durris transmitter at times with an amplified *indoor* TV aerial even though there's no direct line of sight to the transmitter from where I live - there's a wee hill in the way
(Although the TV picture from Durris does depend on the weather conditions, and it's only on the main Freeview channels - the more obscure ones are transmitted at a lower power output, so not much chance of picking them up.)
Anyway, that's enough anoraky stuff for this night/morning -for a minute I forgot this was a taxi forum