Yesterday, 4/24/12 in late afternoon or early evening, I saw what appeared to be an An-22 or Chinese copy. This would have been south of KSTJ (St. Joseph, Mo.) headed southeasterly. It was hard to tell what it was as it was about 30-40 miles away and I was viewing through 16x50 binoculars. I did not see anything appearing on this website or Wolfram Alpha. Anyone have any info??
Tom
Can you provide more of a description ?
High wing or low.
Number of engines.
One vertical tail or more.
There is no Chinese copy of the An-22 BTW, did you mean An-24 (Y-7) ?
After further research the An-12 or Y-8 would be closer to what I thought I saw. It had four engines and a single tall vertical stabilizer. The top half of the fuselage was white, as was the tail. The props reflected the late afternoon sun which is what originally caught my attention. I don’t usually see prop driven cargo aircraft pulling contrails around here. I did hear a Y-8 fly past at 1am on a Minneapolis-Houston route at 24000 ft…very noisy aircraft!!
This perhaps:
flightaware.com/live/flight/TWN9 … /KMEM/KBFI
Maybe this thing was on a return flight to MEM??? I also thought that Wolfram Alpha only shows five or so of the closest flights and there were several pax flights around at the time. I’ve noticed that the “nearby” feature on my FlightAware mobile app is not always close to real time, sometimes a few minutes off. I guess it would be, trying to track a moving object flying at few hundred knots.