Excuse my newb-ness… but Saturday morning (jan 9, 2010), around 10 or 10:30am we were driving and WAY up in the air (at least 20k feet) we saw a contrail of a large jet that had done a relatively “sharp” 180 turn. If I am orienting myself corectly, it was flying about SW and turned back to fly NE. I’m no airplane expert but the plane looked like a commercial type plane.
This was almost directly above McCarran airport but WAY up in the air. Didn’t seem like normal traffic to me.
Anyway, I am lost and can’t figure out how to find the tracking of it and/or figure out what could have been going on…
More than likely, this aircraft was in the corridor on J60 heading down to the SoCal Basin. More than likely, it was headed to LAX. But a good place to start would be to check the arrivals in that time frame to every major commercial airport in the LA Basin (KLAX, KSNA, KLGB, KBUR, KONT). It’s a needle/haystack situation, but that will give you somewhere to start.
If there were 4 sets of contrails, that leaves you with a B747, or A340 coming from the Northeast. Only places in the LA Basin that has those two coming in consistently are KONT and KLAX. If you have a timeframe on when this happened, add 40 minutes to it (this allots for flight time from KLAS to the basin) and see if any arrivals to those two airports at that arrival time made a turn back to the northeast and diverted.
Only place they could go if it were a medical diversion would be SLC, or continue on to SoCal. Either one would have taken the same amount of time to fly.
I was about to say all those. … Another that we would hardly never see, but most likely than any other 4 engined jet other than what you mentioned… Il-76. I’ve seen a video of one at Nellis, but I think it was for red flag…
Think about it though… If it were one of those going to Nellis, would it be higher than FL290, which around that altitude, you’d start to see contrails? KLSV is only 8 miles north of KLAS. They’d be low enough to not be seen over the airport like the OP described.
However… If it were military, that would open another can of worms, leaving EDW, VBG, , MHV, and NTD open. They would be at their TOD for heading to VCV.
I can’t see it being military, it was way up there and if it was interacting with Nellis it seems like it would be lower… unless maybe it was an AWACS or something.
So I am assuming by the responses that there’s no way to search for a “snapshot” of the time in the past to at least see what planes were in the area? Or better yet, a graphic of the actual flight paths of the planes at a specific time period in the past?
It screams of a tanker meeting the receiver. They often fly head on. The tanker makes a 180, when he rolls out the receiver is 1/2 mile in trail and 1000’ feet below. The boomer calls the plane in from there. Highly unlikely either bird was locally based. They often fly 500 miles or more to meet up with each other. It’s part of the training exercise.
Anyone here have a copy of the tanker corridors? I saw them often when I was in the USAF.
… Another that we would hardly never see, but most likely than any other 4 engined jet other than what you mentioned… Il-76. I’ve seen a video of one at Nellis, but I think it was for red flag…
