pat_murray53•26d agoProlific Poster

The day I stopped trusting the 'official' flight path narrative

I was going through old FAA records from 2019 for a hobby project, and noticed the radar data for a certain flight over Phoenix had a 22 minute gap that the official report just glossed over. That's when it hit me that I'd been blindly accepting the summary instead of digging into the raw stuff. After cross-checking with a friend who works ATC in Tucson, he flat out said 'we don't talk about those gaps unless asked.' Has anyone else found that the primary source docs tell a way different story than the news releases?

2 comments

2 Comments

daniel_cooper3426d ago

You flat out said 'we don't talk about those gaps unless asked.' That line gave me chills, honestly. It's one thing to notice a gap in the data, but to have someone in the field basically confirm that there's a reason nobody brings it up, that's a whole other level. I've done some digging into FAA stuff myself over the years and it's amazing what you find when you stop trusting the press release. The way they smooth over the boring parts, the gaps, the little hiccups, it's like they're counting on you not to look closer. Keep pulling that thread, man, because if one guy in Tucson is saying that, imagine how many others just stay quiet.

baker.christopher26d ago

Ran into something similar years ago checking weather radar loops against the public storm reports after a big derecho... the official summary skipped a whole cell that showed up plain as day in the raw data, and when I asked the local NWS office about it they just said the system flags it as "routine" even though it clearly wasn't. Kinda made me wonder if those gaps are just data cleaning or if someone's decided certain things are better left as blank spots on the map. Not saying it's aliens or anything, but the pattern of everyone agreeing not to poke at the holes is weird enough on its own.