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Low and slow in a 4-engine tubejet

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
Sometime between 3 and 3:30 pm Ohio time, I was heading down to the pond to do a little fishing. As I was heading across the meadow, I heard the sound of a jet aircraft coming my way..coming in from the south. At first I thought it was one of the smaller twin engine business type jets that fly around here a lot, but as the plane got closer I knew that wasn't the case.

What it turned out to be, to the best of my knowledge, was a KC135 or something of that size and shape. 4 turbofan engines in underwing nacelle pods. It wasn't a 747...wasn't that big.

But what surprised me was how LOW and SLOW this big bird was. It was down in the small GA air space....2 thousand, maybe 3000 feet. Down were I normally see Pipers and Cessnas and the Beechcraft V-Tail Bonanza flying. And I know that large planes look like they are flying slower than they actually are...but this bird was not in a hurry at all. Maybe 180 mph, maybe even less.

I wish I knew a way to look up air traffic coming through KMFD (Mansfield Lahm Regional) airspace between 3 and 3:30 pm this afternoon. Heading north, 4 engine jetliner type aircraft. BIG jetliner. Would be interesting to know exactly what the plane was, where it came from and where it was going.

There is a chance that it took off from KMFD on runway 14, then turned north. My house is 3 miles east of the end of runway 14..so that is a possibility.

OBIO
 
Not any help to you, but when I was living down in Arkansas, I was under the flight path for Texarkana airport and a lot of traffic heading into Barksdale AFB to the south went right overhead usually at a good altitude.

There was an old DC-3 that was based in Texarkana and it'd go over the house pretty low. It was going slow enough that it would look like it was almost sitting still in the sky.
 
Planes will always be in the darndest of places, and at head scratching altitudes. That's just what planes do.
 
Obio, did you notice the paint scheme?
yall do have a purty good size KC-135 unit up there at Rickenbacker AFB..
 
I can relate. About once every two months or so a heavy flies over my house coming from KMSP, full or nearly full flaps, about 2000-2500ft and power ON. It's always a 747. I wonder why it does that. A go-around?
 
redriver6 said:
Obio, did you notice the paint scheme?
yall do have a purty good size KC-135 unit up there at Rickenbacker AFB..
Click to expand...

All I could see of the plane was the very bottom of the plane....light to medium gray. No markings what so ever on the bottom of the wings or fuselage.
 
OBIO said:
What it turned out to be, to the best of my knowledge, was a KC135 or something of that size and shape. 4 turbofan engines in underwing nacelle pods. It wasn't a 747...wasn't that big.
Click to expand...

Coould be anything from a KC-135 to a late DC-8 to an A340...
 
Did you happen to notice two black stripes running lengthwise on the belly just forward of the wings and a yellow stripe running most of the length in the middle of the belly?
 
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