Love this one…
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/NASA502/history/20090424/1616Z/KEDW/KEDW
Great video – thanks! Now I won’t be able to sleep face down tonight.
Aerial survey, perhaps? But it’s a NASA bird, and who the hell wants another aerial survey of SoCal? Maybe it’s GPS practice?
Thank you for doing that research!
You’re right, it looks quite consistent with UAVSAR testing.
lol!! 
So this thread is actually about flying?
Yes.
The flight path was a mystery, with a distinctive pattern – hence the thread name. The NASA page that FlyNYC found is the likely explanation.
Just **don’t **mention carpet vs. hardwood!!!
. 
If you will notice over time several of the NASA aircraft will make weird patterns,they use them for weather research,pollution research etc.There was one that spent several days over KBHM a few months back making the same criss cross pattern checking pollution by taking air samples,it was one of the King Airs from Langley Center,also they fly from Edwards,Ellington Field,Glenn Research Center,Ames,others you can tell by numbers,400 Numbers are Wallops Aircraft,500 are Langley,600 are Glenn Research Center,700 are Ames Research,800 are Dryden and 900 are Johnson Space Center.
Another article on UAVSAR flights, for earthquake research.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2190
Also look at some other flights:
Southern Louisiana, 17 June (re: subsidence?)
LA Basin, 24 Apr (cf. the original post)
LA Basin, 23 Apr
LA basin, 26 Feb
Bay Area, 20 Feb
It has also stopped recently in Iceland and at Thule Air Base (northern Greenland). Even going cross-country, it’s rarely just a straight shot; some of the omitted flights include long straight loops like these, that go hundreds of miles out of the path.
Look at the similarities of flight path but done in a Conquest II. (A sign of economic times?)
N14NW Flight Tracking and History 18-Jun-2009 (KBFL-KBFL) - FlightAware
OMG…My first post !!!
If you don’t add the bold then you get a clickable link:
flightaware.com/live/flight/N14N … /KBFL/KBFL
This aircraft has had quite a few interesting flights.
No bold for auto-links…roger. See, it really was my 1st post. Thanks for the tip 
You’re welcome. I actually got to thinking after the post that you can do bold - just make sure you put a space between the bold tag and the URL:
** http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N14NW/history/20090618/1810Z/KBFL/KBFL **
yields
** flightaware.com/live/flight/N14N … /KBFL/KBFL ** (no bold below for comparison)
flightaware.com/live/flight/N14N … /KBFL/KBFL
I just noticed my original posting had the closing bold tag at the end but it still took it as a legit link.
Mostly the formatting features are straightforward, but to learn its subtleties from someone else’s post, click on the “Quote” button. It’ll start a new draft message for you, with the raw code for their post included in the draft. You don’t even have to complete and post a message, once you learn how it was done. An example is the old hiding a URL under some explanatory text trick. Or incorporating photos:
http://jpl.nasa.gov/images/arctic/gulfstream-20090430-browse.jpg
Whenever you try something fancy, remember to test it with “Preview” before clicking “Submit”. Not everybody does.
As for the flight you mentioned, it looks like aerial photography/ mapping, but without the retrace/overlap of the NASA502 flights. Since it’s not SAR, it’s most likely visible or IR, and probably not for geological studies. The plane’s owner of record (Wells Fargo) seems to suggest the bank wants the photos, but maybe they just hold the loan for the plane?
Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) flights over Hawaii volcano, 9-day mission planned.
NASA press release
April 4 flight
April 6 flight home (why?)
April 8 flying patterns around the back yard (instrument checkout?)
My best wild guess is that the SAR instrument wasn’t working quite right in Hawaii, so they flew home to fix & test it. But I’m curious whether the govt shutdown/furlough threat had anything to do with it.