While speculating is fun I'd like to know for sure

October 30, 2008 8:06 AM

Mrs Mutant & I live in London. We see lots of planes flying overhead. We wonder where they are coming from and where they are going and how to find out.

I'm a farm boy and pretty much always orient myself by compass; I know where Heathrow, Gatwick and City Island (our local) airports are relative to our home in London's East End, and I can tell when planes are coming from or going to those airports. We currently use City to get to Amsterdam every month and that airport only flies two engine prop Fokker 50's, so that's easy. And there were years when I was flying about 100K miles (or more) annually for banking, so I know the approach and descent routes for the other airports in the metropolitan area.

But we're not interested in planes that are landing or taking off, we'd really like to know about the aircraft that are flying at 30K feet or more; small silvery specks, perhaps leaving contrails. While its fascinating to look up and speculate where these planes are coming from and where they're going (and who is on board and of course what they are doing), I'd like to know for sure.

I suspect some originate at Continental airports (e.g., Schiphol, Frankfurt am Main, de Gaulle, Paris-Orly, etc) and perhaps pass over London on their way to North American destinations, but how is there any way we can tell? Also, some must be long haul flights originating at points east of London (e.g., Stockholm-Arlanda, Istanbul Atatürk, Cairo etc) and are just passing over as well, but is there any way to tell for certain?

Even knowing what flight paths take aircraft over the London metropolitan region would be helpful.

posted by Mutant to grab bag (10 comments total)

I suspect most of them are in the Bovingdon Stack, which is the main holding stack for flights landing at Heathrow. Each of the major London airports will have equivalent stacks.
posted by Happy Dave at 8:28 AM on October 30, 2008

This appears to be an online version of a relevant aeronautical chart, which if you zoom out shows some of the routes taken by planes. Unfortunately, Europe doesn't seen to have the degree of free access to charts and free flight tracking (e.g., flightaware.com) that we have in the U.S.
posted by exogenous at 8:57 AM on October 30, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

You need to remember that Heathrow is one of the largest international airport hubs in the world. Flights from almost everywhere are landing there. Last year alone I flew to London from San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Entebbe, and Lusaka. So you're going to be looking at a ridiculous amount of flights if that's what you're really up for.

If you are, you might want to invest in Aeroseek. Puts the flights right on Google Earth for you so you can see where it is in relation to your house.
posted by allkindsoftime at 9:14 AM on October 30, 2008

Here's a discussion of routing into Heathrow (including the Bovingdon stack).

Here's a series of (low quality) maps of the major flight routes.

This site has a number of technical approach maps in .pdf format. Scroll to the bottom for the United Kingdom.

And here's a little Google Earth widget that plots the approximate routes of flights within the UK.

None is a perfect answer to your question, but may assist you in further speculative flights of fancy.
posted by googly at 9:19 AM on October 30, 2008

here is a recent airliners.net discussion showing 16 widebodies on approach for heathrow at the same time.

nearly all the flights from germany, scandinavia, france, italy and the benelux countries to north and south america pass over shannon, ireland, before they chance course to jump across the pond. that's why you see so much high-altitude traffic around here as well. flight aware tracks any tail/flight number / airport movement in the US. sadly there isn't a similar free service for the rest of the world right now. (or at least I'm not aware of one.)

you are mistaken in thinking city airport only has fokker 50's - they also have avro jets (BAE146, sometimes called "jumbolino"), atr42&72 and a host of private jets that are parked at the 'jet centre' near the end of the runway. pretty soon you'll also see BA operating an all-business class airbus 318 to JFK. there is a lot of activity going on.

bovington stack: when heathrow is operating landings across the city, the airplanes come from north into about stratford, where they turn onto the glideslope and follow down the river thames to heathrow. (they rotate this and you'll often see them coming from the south until about the same height if they're using the other runway.) those flights however are much lower by the time they are over london. I think they're at around 5000 feet at stratford, so they're easily distinguishable from the much higher travelling flyovers.
posted by krautland at 10:29 AM on October 30, 2008

Gosh these are all excellent, informative answers guys and sorry for not being clear with my first query (I didn't really know the appropriate word, however krautland used it as did a couple of the links you folks provided), but it's the flyovers we're curious about.

The lower flying stuff is neat and majestic to watch as they traverse London at maybe 5,000 feet, but what about the really, really high flying planes - the contrailing dots - that clearly either haven't originated nor are landing here? I'd really like to be able to find out where they started from and where they're going - the flyover flights.


krautland -- "you are mistaken in thinking city airport only has fokker 50's - they also have avro jets (BAE146, sometimes called "jumbolino"),..."

Absolutely correct - we only take the Amsterdam flights and both KLM and VLM operate Fokker 50's ... great planes, very nice ride in stormy weather, all bouncing about, have to bring them in fast and hard when the winds are high. But yes, I'd forgotten about the other planes. Not to go off topic, but I was checking out the BA biz flights to New York (Mrs Mutant & I had previously been using EOS for our trips to New York), and these aren't non stop; apparently they land at Shannon, Ireland for Customs & Immigration, then continue to JFK. Interesting.
posted by Mutant at 12:25 PM on October 30, 2008

If you want to invest a little money in a receiver and a good antenna, you can connect a radio to your computer and decode data transmissions from passing airplanes to learn more about them.

The cheap solution with somewhat limited effectiveness is to listen to ACARS. This is a radio data system mainly used to allow aircraft to communicate back to their company dispatch offices. Depending on the aircraft, it reports everything from wheels up/down times (i.e. time the plane lifted off/touched down), position and altitude, engine performance on takeoff and in cruise, and maintenance faults detected during flight (so spare parts can be waiting at the destination). Some planes even have a console that lets the crew send simple messages, which are always interesting to read. It's pretty neat, but the data is so varied that you can't always learn much from it. The only thing you will definitely get every time is airline, flight number, and aircraft type. ACARSd will do the decoding, and can look up flight numbers online to tell you where they are coming from/heading to, with some degree of accuracy. Sometimes it even pops up a picture of the actual plane, if some plane spotter has photographed it. It would probably cost you around $200 to get set up for this.

A more expensive and very effective solution is to decode ADS-B transmissions. These are sent constantly, and are used by air traffic control and aircraft collision-avoidance systems, so they are standardized in what they transmit. I think you get position, heading, altitude, speed, and maybe flight number. The downside is that the radio needed to receive this costs around $800. See here.
posted by autojack at 12:27 PM on October 30, 2008

I think I've flown over the UK every time I've flown to Poland or Germany from North America. I imagine those flights may be the small, silvery specks you're talking about.
posted by oneirodynia at 1:40 PM on October 30, 2008

ha, what a coincidence. I actually helped launch EOS back in the day and I'm still sad they went under. you are also right about BA having to make a connection in shannon but it's said to only add an hour, which you'll easily save going to heathrow. also note you won't have to stand in the immigration line at jfk. the only downside I see is that the seat isn't going to be completely lie-flat because it's a smaller plane.
posted by krautland at 12:25 PM on October 31, 2008

krautland -- "ha, what a coincidence. I actually helped launch EOS back in the day and I'm still sad they went under. "

Wow small world - we loved EOS as well, used them for our "personal" flights back to New York. About one half of the cost of a Business Class ticket on the bigger carriers and you got far more for your money.

For me the best thing about EOS was the people; everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone seemed very, very happy to be working there. Reminded me a lot of the attitude of people on Virgin Upper Class in the mid 90's before they got all "big company". Shame EOS is gone, I haven't seen their business plan, but I still find it hard to believe - all of our flights were always fully booked.
posted by Mutant at 1:30 AM on November 3, 2008