About 10 minutes ago an airplane passed by my house flying extremely low. I live in a somewhat rural area, one a small hill with a ~3 acre field in front of my house sloping down to the road. Although this is supposedly just a backroad, it has turned out to be a convenient link between two major highways, so has been recently improved and has quite a bit of traffic.
I have trees around my house - this airplane seemed to be following the road, and was so low that I could see it’s lights thru the trees. This is damned low - cropduster low. Hit a relay tower low.
It was headed in the general direction of our very small private airport - which is also close to a chemical weapons storage facility. At least it looked like a fairly small plane - not a little 2-seater or anything, but not an airliner, either.
I haven’t heard a boom yet - I hope to hell it either belongs to the military or some damn fool idiot private pilot that needs his ass grounded.
Okay, no ka-booms, no sign of fire in the distance, no sirens, so I guess this guy made it wherever he was going. Holy Moses, he was flying below tree level! (The trees on this hill, anyway)
sigh I guess I better get used to it - probably the government repair shop here testing some kind of radar. We see all kinds of weird stuff here - 5 or 6 parachute flares floating around in the sky at night, pink and green gas clouds, teams of fighter jets blasting over the house low enough to see the rivets on the bottom - and you can hear them testing artillery and blowing things up sometimes. There’ll be a lot of that going on now that the military is mobilized.
Damn, now I’m mad because I’m jumping at every sound. Anybody want to trade houses? I wouldn’t mind moving somewhere about 100 miles away.
I live near an airport and several times I’ve been SURE I was witnessing a plane crash because someone was so low or flying so weird. I don’t know what it is, but it unnerves me every single time.
Yeah, me too; I don’t live near an airport, but when we have fighters or helicopters out playing around you know they’re testing some equipment they’ve repaired - and you hope they did a good job!
The only nightmares I have, beside the usual “late for the exam/forgot to pay the gas bill” ones that have way TOO much in common with real life, are airplane crash ones. Planes falling out of the sky willynilly. Working next to airports didn’t help (our parking lot was treated as a helipad by aircraft incapable of using helipads, with the expected results, plus I saw the plume from Flight 191 after it went in) but the “worst” was the guy towing a banner who was diving nearly vertically into the ground just over the next rise on the highway. When I got to where the crash would have been he was happily taxiing into the distance while the banner was piled neatly at the end of the runway. I coulda kicked his ass for giving me that start!
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