Q: How to ID an aircraft that flew over my house

I hope I’ve posted this question properly, I am not a pilot or involved in air transportation I just read flightaware squawks because they’re interesting!

I thought this might be the best place to ask, is there somewhere to search flight paths or plans to identify an extremely loud, very low flying, aggressive sounding aircraft that just flew over my house in the bay area, California?

Are you near an airport?

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Can you go outside and see the plane? Is it commercial, military or General Aviation?

If it is low and close enough you will be able to see the tail number.

If that doesn’t work you can look online.

The easiest way is to look at one of the websites such as Flightaware or Flightradar24 or Planefinder etc.

Drag to your location and zoom in. See it you can see the plane going near your location. They report in near real time.

It may not appear for a number of reasons. The next thing to do is build your own ADS-B receiver and listen for their beacon broadcast (and then you can also feed Flightaware).

These are planes at a local GA airport doing training flights as displayed on my Piaware local system built from these instructions.

This discussion panel is definitely the place to ask.

S.

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Thank you so much for the links! The folks in my neighborhood informed me it was a C130 and they are testing new computer systems. I found one on YouTube and that’s what I heard, it flew so close, one gentleman said he’s never seen one flight that low before over homes.

I love those links and info, interesting planes fly over my area a lot and now I know how to identify them, awesome!

As far as air travel goes I think Moffett Field would be considered close to my residence. San Jose airport would be the next closest but it’s a about 30 miles away.

More than likely since you are near Moffett they just received their newest HC-130J they use for rescue,probably getting the crews adjusted to the new systems,they use to use the old MC-130P,so quite an upgrade to the HC-130J.