Message posted by Casper (Member since 01/24/2011) on February 15, 2024 at 11:42:25 PST:
Definitely an interesting track. I'd lean more toward following the border than skipping populated areas. If you look at the Texas portion of the flight, it was 2am local time, the aircraft was at 54,000 feet. If you're trying to skirt population centers, you go north of El Paso (as they did, and then cut across ranchland and as long as you pop out South of Corpus Christi, you're not hitting anything bigger than Kingsville and the 25,000 people sleeping in that town are immune to overflights because NAS Kingsville is the training base for about 50% of Naval aviators. But they went even further south. Probably 100+ miles further south than then needed to before swinging out over the Gulf of Mexico. So, either they wanted to follow the border and test out some sensors or else this item was REALLY sight sensitive and they didn't want to risk any populated cities. But it arrived at 7:30am local time in Patuxent River and I've got to imagine plenty of people saw it descending over the Chesapeake Bay for landing in broad daylight.
In Reply to: Triton Road Trip posted by Joerg (Webmaster) on February 15, 2024 at 10:50:38 PST:
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