Interesting. I'll see if I can catch one on camera, the wind has to be right for them to take off in this direction and it is night right now but it happens with some regularity.
There are lots of interesting craft here, not just AWACS.
Google maps has the area 'obfuscated', so I can't use that to look at the planes (it was to be expected), but I'm sure an opportunity will come soon enough.
edit: this side of the border there is actually quite a bit of resistance against the AWACS craft taking off and landing because they are technically in Germany but the noise pollution is mostly felt on the dutch side which is much more densely inhabited than the German one.
You don't usually see the take off on radar, especially not with high terrain around.
Western airport radar has gotten pretty good at picking up a plane within 2 miles from the runway but that's if it's specifically designed for it and positioned at the airport.
So some mobile missile launcher array would see the plane pop up a lot later. Someone sitting at the screen with their finger on the trigger could be startled by the first flight of the day and launch.
Maybe, but aircraft tend to follow much stricter paths than one would normally believe. Particularly around urban centers (airports) they queue up and only really fly a few routes through the area. On clear nights you can often see the lines of nav and landing lights forming as aircraft approach the city.
Well, commercial airliners don't have radar that would necessarily pick it up.
I must admit, I'm a little gob-smacked that he just launched without a clearance from the FAA, but I don't have a map of the airways there so perhaps it was outside controlled airspace. Even so... whew.
No it wouldn't. A recon plane would be pointing mostly at the ground rather than in front of above the plane. And you're assuming international flights, whereas there is abundant domestic air traffic in the US that never leaves the country.
This has happened before. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 north american airspace was closed. All those international flights from europe were not allowed into US airspace. So they started piling up on canadian tarmac. Small towns like Gander Newfoundland saw their populations double in a matter of hours as transatlantic flights landed on their tiny airport. We don't have drone footage, but I've heard stories about aircraft being parked on grass ... something everyone is loathed to do.
In the US at least (probably most other places too), aircraft are tracked pretty accurately, so if you know the time it happened and the pilot can give a rough bearing, some triangulation should be possible. Add to that the fact that the area around airports (where such lasering usually occurs) is usually sparsely populated due to people not wanting to live near and airport, and it’s easy to see how it might be possible to narrow it down to a specific address.
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