Yesterday (Monday 28th September 2015), I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and stumbled across Jerry PH9HB aeronautical mobile, calling CQ all on his own on 20m. I had also been lucky enough to work Jerry about a week before, whilst he was in the cockpit of a 737 cruising over Portugal.
For more info and photos from my previous QSO with Jerry, please see my previous post at…..
https://vk5pas.org/2015/09/24/aeronautical-mobile/
This time Jerry’s signal was a little lower than last time, but my signal report of 5/7 was a lot stronger than the 4/4 I had received a week ago.
On this flight, Jerry was behind the controls of a Boeing 737-8K2 aircraft, PH-HSE, enroute to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands off the coast of western Africa, from Amsterdam in The Netherlands. He was cruising at 37,000 feet and travelling at 474 knots.
As I did on the previous occasion I jumped onto Flight Tracker and had soon located Jerry’s flight, TRA6Y. Jerry was out over the South Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Portugal, about 100 km south west of Lisbon.
Flight Tracker is very interesting. You can even get a cockpit view, which you can see below.
I had a good 4 minute chat with Jerry, but was cognisant that there would be others that would Like Jerry in the log.
Here’s an image of all the aircraft over Europe at the time. Amazing!
And here is an image of all the aircraft in the sky in the world at the time. Even more amazing!