There were several posts observing light - unusually so - activity over the weekend. So either dark or not much going on. I'm on the fence as to this topic/its significance.
Not sure how much you know so starting at the beginning, each plane has a transponder that is constantly squawking so that other planes, air traffic control (ATC) etc know about them, for safety/crash avoidance/ATC/etc purposes.
Every plane you see is because a network of antennae/sensors (not sure) pick up the squawks (many of these are hobbyists feeding data by the way, much like hobby weather people volunteer their weather station data).
Now click "U" at the upper right. This makes all the civil/commercial traffic disappear, only showing military. Well, if the military doesn't want you to know a flight is there, or guess what they're up to, or whatever, they can turn the transponder off. They tend not to do this during normal operations (see first paragraph), so a significant lack of squawking could indicate something is up. Sometimes you can watch in real time, say a flight takes off and as soon as they are up it disappears, because they had their transponder on for the dangerous/congested part but are doing something secret or whatever.
Additional note, you can hover on a plane to see what it is, callsign etc, or click it and see its flight path in progress (and if you see odd jumps or whatever, that's a data error as the network of sensors isn't perfect/has gaps/what have you).
Did they go dark or are you implying this might occur tomorrow?
There were several posts observing light - unusually so - activity over the weekend. So either dark or not much going on. I'm on the fence as to this topic/its significance.
Exactly what does it mean when military transponders go dark? I read about this several days ago.
Not sure how much you know so starting at the beginning, each plane has a transponder that is constantly squawking so that other planes, air traffic control (ATC) etc know about them, for safety/crash avoidance/ATC/etc purposes.
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Every plane you see is because a network of antennae/sensors (not sure) pick up the squawks (many of these are hobbyists feeding data by the way, much like hobby weather people volunteer their weather station data).
Now click "U" at the upper right. This makes all the civil/commercial traffic disappear, only showing military. Well, if the military doesn't want you to know a flight is there, or guess what they're up to, or whatever, they can turn the transponder off. They tend not to do this during normal operations (see first paragraph), so a significant lack of squawking could indicate something is up. Sometimes you can watch in real time, say a flight takes off and as soon as they are up it disappears, because they had their transponder on for the dangerous/congested part but are doing something secret or whatever.
Additional note, you can hover on a plane to see what it is, callsign etc, or click it and see its flight path in progress (and if you see odd jumps or whatever, that's a data error as the network of sensors isn't perfect/has gaps/what have you).
Happy plane fagging!
Thank you! I was wondering the same thing
A lot of people in my town have noticed things like that as well as sounds for years now which we assume is from the nearby military base.