AWACS over campground

From What The Wiki?!

On friday an unusual plane was sighted flying over the campground at about 15:45. Quite some people suspected it was an AWACS plane, now there's finally a photo available. The rotating antenna can clearly be seen above the rear part so there should be no doubts left. What remains unknown is whether the antenna was really rotating (nobody saw for sure) or if they were just flying over us by chance without warflying our WLANs... Actually I really don't see a reason for this to be an intentional fly-over, but whoever wants to be paranoid, now would be a good time to get the tinfoil hat out...

Note that we are close to Eindhoven Airport, which is also used by the military.

The standard operating procedures for Eindhoven airport can be found on the Web. At the end of this page you will find links to some graphical charts illustrating the routes commonly flown by aircraft departing from or approaching Eindhoven airport.

The picture was taken from the center path of E1. This does imply that the aircraft was north-east-bound. Have a look at the map. E1 is in the lower left corner, and there is a small red circle on the map with an arrow inside pointing northwards. If I interpret abovementioned charts correctly, standard operating procedures would imply a north-western, western or even south-western heading in the vicinity of Boxtel if the plane was on a departure route from Eindhoven.

Conclusion: either this was a non-standard operation, or the operating procedures for civilian aviation generally do not apply to military operations. Further observations: I also saw a fighter aircraft on a similar flight path during the first day, but not a single civilian aircraft during the entire event. Another camp inhabitant told me that there had been at least one more AWACS flyover before, but I don't have any confirmation or further info on that.

Perhaps somebody should ask the locals there whether they see this type of military aircraft at other times as well. Or watch air traffic for a while after the camp has been taken down. Plane spotters, BTW, can't seem to spot AWACS planes at Eindhoven, only fighter and transport aircraft. The closest NATO AWACS base from Boxtel seems to be Geilenkirchen in Germany (see also the Wikipedia entry). Which is not really far from Boxtel either: Geilenkirchen is located roughly in the center of the triangle formed by Maastricht (.nl), Aachen and Mönchengladbach (both .de).

By the way, while looking up all that information I happened to find out that there can in fact be no-fly areas on an airfield. Amazing, isn't it?

There are more AWACS passing the campground from time to time... BugBlue 2 August 2005 18:14 (CEST)

The pictures were taken from Area E1, here a more complete view:

The fiber-party also got a fly-over by an AWACS... anyone got the pics ? Oversight 8 August 2005 16:15 (CEST)

Keywords: airplane, aeroplane, aircraft, military operations