Navajo flying for hours !
 

Has anybody come across this before ? I have had a Navajo flying around for about 5 hours at about 10,000 ft. It goes to Bovingdon, back towards Luton, then back to St. Albans and so on. It is still flying out there now ! Can't see it on flightradar. Strange.

Your thoughts anybody.

Cheers

Paul

There are lots of "survey" flights for various reasons - aerial mapping, Ordnance Survey, etc. I don't think there is anything untoward in what you saw. Bit of a pain for ATC though!

In addition to the mundane examples listed, there are also the Stringray Navajos operated by 2Excel to supplement the Northolt Flight Islanders in intercepting mobile phone communications. Allegedly, of course.

Basically advertise themselves as a cell tower and route calls, siphoning off the interesting ones. Pretty common technique in the USA as well.

Plenty of info on the public web if you have a search, nothing new revealed here. Not sure why people try to hush it.

I'll give you one guess.......

Council Van. Ultimately it is down to the ATCO wearing the electric hat who decides whether a flight may take place, irrespective of what any supervisory staff have agreed, except in the case of special priority flights obviously.

Many special flights cause no problems but depending on the traffic situation they may have to be refused or curtailed during the flight (I've been there, done that) and some of the low-level flights can cause extreme chaos.

As for the bloke who was asked to drive to Manch to point out the error in their ways...... unbelievable.

A notable operation during the 2012 Olympics in London was, from what I recall reading at the time, the live transmission of the various outside broadcast TV cameras, which had always given problems linking ground-based relay units. The transmissions were aimed upwards to a King Air which was in a hold for hours at a time at about 20,000 ft over Lambourne VOR, which then transmitted onwards down to a single ground receiving station. Apparently it worked fine, but a bit of a tedious one for the crew.

I heard one operating westbound through the LTMA very late Friday/early hours of Saturday ex EGMC towards 'LL. Thought it might have been a calibrator?

It was. "Neeeeeeowww" low level over East London every 10 minutes after midnight.