Spend that Money

 I heard a plane somewhere over the island (Tuesday July 19, 2022) and with the fly-in fish boil fresh in my mind I looked on flightradar24.com and noticed a plane on a weird flight path, making a series of parallel passes over the island.

from flightradar24.com

What was this pilot/plane doing ?  Kinda like it was cutting the grass using a mower with a lousy turning radius.

Flew up from GB so probably not an islander, then all those passes (27?) from SW to NE.  Taking a training flight, taking data or photos or ?

I tried looking up the N119RF and found this alternative to flightradar24:

https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N119RF

Flightaware.com seems to smooth out the waypoints in a less jarring fashion than flightradar24.
 

Then it did one pass across the island from se to nw and then seemed to take a quick jump over to escanaba mi for  pit stop ?

ended with a 90 degree pass and then flew over to Escanaba, MI

5 hours of flying, 777 miles. Looks expensive !  figure at least $6/gallon, say 300 gallons for 5 hours ?  that's $1800 !  yikes

I did get a picture on the last SW to NE pass but the plane (and it's a pretty big plane for a single engine) was just a smudge.

taken with the normal lens

But then later the plane took off for a second round of raster scanning.  First I tried a 200 mm lens but not quite enough magnification.

with a 200mm lens

  So as the plane got closer to my house I tried a 500 mm lens which was just about right.  I could see the plane number and also a hole in the bottom of the plane where there's a green light (laser, lidar ?).  So no doubt it's a scan of some kind.

500mm lens makes the N119RF easier to see

a second picture with the 500 mm lens, notice the green dot

The second pass took another 4 hours, 600 miles - they didn't quite seem to finish the whole island but then returned to Green Bay.  Maybe they'll be back ?

another finish with the 90 degree cross and then back to Green Bay

a closeup of the 2nd flight over the island

a summary of N119RF recent flights

I wonder what was being done and who did it, figure it cost well over $5000 to do the scanning, probably double that.  Interesting !

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm