Post by Innos on Jul 31, 2008 21:07:28 GMT -5
If anyone hasn't figured out all ready, I'm working on my PPL (Private Pilot's License) so sometimes I have to do a nighttime flight. They are fairly routine: take off, dick around for 45 minutes, land; it's a 1-hour flight and I do them during the day and the night. So I performed my usual nighttime flight when I take off and fly in the direction of the P-40 Restricted Airspace (the airspace that is Camp David- Presidential Retreat, named after Eisenhower's nephew -and Site R- "Underground Pentagon" it's the closest crisis control center to Washington, DC and in the even of the Pentagon blowing up, the important guys go there and keep working like nothing happened) and fly in that course until I'm about 2 nm (Nautical Miles) away from the Extended P-40 (the restricted airspace gets bigger when anyone "important" is at either location). You don't usually see many aircraft around there unless the Extended P-40 is up when F-16's patrol the area but the P-40 was at it's normal state so it would be a clear flight. The moon was bright, clear skies, beautiful weather for a night flight. I come to my usual turn-about area and begin to pull a mild squirrel-turn, banking about 45 degrees and as I'm checking ahead of me I see a set of lights. It was not in my path so I finished my turn and started to head home. As I got closer to pass the set of lights I thought that they were fairly large to be a small aircraft but not making enough noise to be a jet and that the East Coast is not where experimental military aircraft are taking to test out various systems. I find myself speaking to the empty cabin of my borrowed RV-4 "What the hell are you". As soon as we passed eachother, I turned around to see if it was indeed a jet moving low and slow and I saw no jet fires. To this day I'm not sure what the hell it was.
