Over the past several weeks a Piston Powered Convair has been flying patterns over Sacramento CA. The flights appear around 6 PM and continue to after sunset… The aircraft is definitely a piston powered convair - there’s nothing else that sounds like that - I am an ex air traffic controller and airplane buff.
The convair has an elongated nose radome and several sensor “bumps” below the fuselage. We have two closed military bases in the area - airplane doesn’t seem to be originating from them although McClellan has an active Army King-Air modification program - those airplanes have more sensor pods than I can count…
Anyone got any ideas? Ratheon seems to have a convair like this??..
Yep! that’s it… you from around the Sacramento area? I’ve tried to
catch it at McClellan but havn’t seen it on the ground. It’s flying regular patterns over the East-North side of town. Thanks!
I’m not from CA (I’m in DC). But I’m a bit of a Convair hound. I have a room full of 1/100th & larger Convair models, artwork, blueprints, cockpit parts, etc.
One of my best memories as a kid was flying on North Central 580’s on the milkrun through Wisconsin. I was fascinated by the retracting stairs for some reason. A trip from O’Hare to Rhinelander made 5 stops.
I flew a United CV340 from San Francisco to Merced in 1968… Nothing like the old piston props is there? That’s what attracted my attention in the first place on the Convair flying over Sacramento… the noise of those big engines!
I also flew on Lockheed Connies in the Air Force… really miss those planes.
I’ve found a few discussions from the last few years where people noticed the same sort of activity from the same aircraft. Some occurred in TX (the aircraft was based in Midlothian, TX for a while). And others saw some low passes around BWI & DC (close to me).
I’ve seen this a number of times in the past few months, flying directly over Rocklin, CA, either NW-SE of SE-NW, about 10Kft. Seemed pretty high to be coming/going to McClellan
N131CR - AIRBORNE RESOURCES INC (MIDLOTHIAN TX)
This aircraft (N131CR) is not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator.
I was just reading about the ASDI data feed and BARR requests. Once a BARR flight is complete, the flight info should be available. One might try a FOI request for the data from FAA and see what happens.
