N83 Circling

Today I was working in my yard when a plane that’s not usually in the area as far as I know flew overhead. A few minutes later one just like it flew overhead in the same direction. A few minutes later, it happened again. This time I noticed it banking when it was northwest of me, so I went inside to get my camera, figuring I might get some pictures. Next time around it was SW of me. Two more passes, and I got some decent photos, which I uploaded (hope I didn’t upload too many). A couple were good enough to read the tail number, N83, which I think is the shortest tail number I’ve seen. Looks like it’s owned by the FAA.

Any idea what it’s doing circling Austin? There was another single prop plane circling this morning. Probably unrelated, but yesterday was the third anniversary of the plane being flown into the Echelon building not too far away.

N83 is a Flight Check aircraft…I found a nice article about flight check ops while looking this up…

ainonline.com/aviation-news/ … operations

Thanks. Very interesting article. I guess that explains the circling. Do you think I can assume KAUS then? I’m a few miles away from KAUS and planes regularly fly overhead on their way to KAUS, usually just to my east but not always. There are other smaller airports nearby, which is why I left the airport code blank. I didn’t want to make unwarranted assumptions.

Most probably AUS…they need to do multiple approaches to do all the testing they need to do.

All aircraft in the USA that are registered from N1 to N99 without any letter suffixes inclusive are FAA aircraft.