Thinking of writing an airplanes-flying-in-a-circle twitter bot that calls out circling planes anywhere in the world in realtime. Circles aren't the only interesting flight pattern, but they're a major one.
These are samples from my historical data.
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Circlebot is coming along. It has a fuzzy idea of what constitutes a circle, which may need further refinement.
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The bot is finding some circling out there tonight. It sorta triggers after two loops, and you can see it is (sometimes) quite precise about that.
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The bot noticed this heli is busy tonight. N160CD, which I haven't seen before, is owned by Unical Defense, a "military-focused business" that has been part of a nighttime firefighting program. There's a photo (on airhistory.net) from last month of it doing a water drop.
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While I definitely need to trim the bot's idea of notable circles (maybe filter out anything within a mile of an airport), it's still finding interesting stuff. This is 04-27011, a US Army Blackhawk, circling over Cal State Fullerton.
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N6602L, a neat looking type I hadn't seen before, is flying circles over the ocean 60 miles west of San Diego. Ownership is obscured, but here's a reference to it doing the same thing in the same place two years ago, to the day(?!)
Quote Tweet
N6602L PARTENAVIA S.P.A. P 68 OBSERVER Based in #Oxnard looking like it is on a DHS or Military Mission @AircraftSpots
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I thiiink this might actually be a power line inspection flight! I don't think I've ever seen a track quite like this. It's kind of amazing how looking for circles is a super easy entry point to so many interesting stories--Now I'm imagining a Richard Scarry book, _Sky Circles_.
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Two Cessnas circling, almost flying in formation near Corona, CA. Reg'd to "H2 LINK CO", which last year had 0 planes and how has 7. These two planes make several flights every day, usually circling near Chino airport for an hour or two.
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N5734B and N12281 (LlcRazorback) apparently flying in formation south of Riverside, CA.
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The bot is very close to tweeting, now. Here's a sample:
"N103CG is circling over Burbank at 1375 feet, speed 59 MPH, squawking 0241, 0.086 miles from Burbank City Hall Annex"
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"N130SK is circling over Lakewood at 325 feet, speed 47 MPH, squawking 5500, 0.101 miles from Social Security"
(It's not easy to find good data to use as landmarks.)
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"N108PP is circling over Pomona at 1200 feet, speed 75 MPH, squawking 1206, 0.519 miles from Kellogg Polytechnic Elementary School"
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And 15 minutes later, it sees N103CG circling somewhere else.
"N103CG is circling over Panorama City, Los Angeles at 1375 feet, speed 62 MPH, squawking 0241, 0.229 miles from Valley Ops Bureau and Valley Traffic Division"
This description includes neighborhood as well as city.
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"N267LA is circling over Downtown Los Angeles, Los Angeles at 550 feet, speed 119 MPH, squawking 1200, 0.098 miles from Original Pantry Cafe"
Kind of weird that the neighborhood includes the city name, eh? Also, the bot summed 3 circles over a mile or so. Hey, it's simple code!
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I think I need to create a little Docker image of an API to the FAA registration database. Surprised that doesn't already exist.
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Here's logs of the bot detecting and deciding to post about one aircraft, and then later filtering out a circle because it's too close to an airport.
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