Thousands watching US spy planes and tankers over Europe

26 February, 2022

2 min read

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Geoffrey Thomas

Geoffrey Thomas

26 February, 2022

The most-watched aircraft on the flight tracking App Flightradar 24 are a Global Hawk unmanned spy plane and USAF KC135 and KC10 tankers. The unmanned Global Hawk has been flying over the Black Sea just south of Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol while the KC135 (Boeing 707s) and KC10 (DC-10) tankers have been stationed over Romania and Poland. Over 58,000 people are watching the activities of the Global Hawk which has a call sign of “Forte12” or "Forte11". READ: Is the Antonov AN-225 destroyed? READ: New weather analysis supports revolutionary WSPRnet MH370 tracking  READ: Qantas reactivates Project Sunrise for ultra-long-range nonstops READ: Airlines avoiding all Ukrainian airspace The $170 million aircraft is piloted remotely and operates from Italy. It has an endurance of about 32 hours and can fly over 22,000km at an altitude of 18,000m. Here is Saturday's mission of Forte11. Here are the flight tracks of the two KC-135s which are operating out of bases in the United Kingdom. Tens of thousands of people are monitoring their flight paths. The tankers would be supporting AWACs spy planes and possibly fighters patrolling the air space. ABOUT AirlineRatings.com Airlineratings.com was developed to provide everyone in the world a one-stop shop for everything related to airlines, formed by a team of aviation editors, who have forensically researched nearly every airline in the world. Our rating system is rated from one to seven stars on safety – with seven being the highest ranking. Within each airline, you will find the country of origin, airline code, booking URL, and seat map information. The rating system takes into account a number of different factors related to audits from aviation’s governing bodies, lead associations, as well as the airlines, own safety data. Every airline has a safety rating breakdown so you can see exactly how they rate. Over 230 of the airlines on the site that carry 99 percent of the world’s passengers have a product rating. Given that low cost, regional and full-service carriers are so different we have constructed a different rating system for each which can be found within each airline.  

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