Message posted by lone wolf on December 24, 2005 at 16:17:37 PST:
Lets not include the flight plan with BLD as I don't believe that is a normal flight plan. We already have two locations with one name, specifically TNX being both the TTR and Groom Lake. Rarely is TKM used. In fact, some flights between Groom and the TTR are filed as round robins. If you follow the janets on passur, you will see the tracking goes much futher north than is the case with flighaware. Just get the times from flightaware from a Janet that went to Groom, then play back the flight with passur. There is no official link to LAS on passur, but you can see it at Keyhole is rarely in effect. My guess is that they go to Keyhole when there are visitors on the Nevada Test Site. If you take the tour, you will not see a Janet fly overhead. Well, at least I never did. If FIDOE is over the NTS, then there wouldn't be a need for flights going to the TTR to use the FIDOE fix. When Janets land at the TTR, there is no secret tower frequency or callsign change. The North Base gang would like you to believe all those planes DO land at the TTR, so the last thing they would do is hide this. Now looking at LAS294052 (N36.60380 W116.01501) and BTY060030 (N36.93945 W116.14856), there could be something odd about FIDOE being a fix inside the restricted range, but still it wouldn't be impossible. All it would mean is much of the trip takes place over the range. Those conversions to lat/lon are mine, so don't take them as gospel. However, I get LAS294052 nearly at DRA. So if FIDOE was say just east of KINS, then the flight planes would make sense. I'm not ruling out your interpretation of FIDOE, but don't use the fact that flightaware drops the tracking so early in the flight. I'm not completely sure how passur works, but I gather it can hear the interrogation ping from the FAA, then it knows how to decode the mode-C transponder (squawk or altitude). What I don't know is how pasur gets the location, which could be from the FAA, or simply by measuring the relative time delays from the ping generated by the aircraft at assorted receiver sites. I don't see any recording of LAS clearance/delivery for Janets on the net. I have some somewhere on some PC, but they are quite old so I don't know how useful they would be. Getting a recent clearance/delivery might clear up the use of FIDOE.
http://www4.passur.com/las.html
In Reply to: Re: Janet and FIDOE posted by Ron on December 24, 2005 at 14:50:27 PST:
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