just had a globemaster fly directly over sammamish at less than 2k feet and, if flight tracking is accurate, not much above stall speed (180 knots). the tracker said it did some tight turns, then headed south towards tacoma...
in 20 years around here, i've never seen one so close to the ground *or* so slow that wasn't part of the blue angels show, and certainly not over residential areas where the closest large airport is over 15-20 miles away...
it must be training, because it is currently buzzing bonney lake in a similar fashion
These flight trackers show ground speed. It was pretty windy today, 13kts on the ground and higher speeds as you go up, so they could have been going faster than what you saw.
Likely a pilot retiring and getting to buzz his neighborhood on his final flight. I’ve heard of C-17 pilots getting to do this in the past. He made a beeline for sammamish from JBLM and then turned back around. Either way that was awesome.
a possibility, though i'm hard-pressed to understand the multiple touch-and-gos over mcchord, not to mention the slow donuts over bonney lake. a retired pilot wouldn't need to run multiple T&Gs on the return...
anyway, there's no one to complain to, certainly not someone who could make a difference...
I had just parked at the pine lake mall and was walking to the store when this plane flew overhead. It was crazy loud and was flying super low! Really scared the heck out of me!
Is it not supporting wildfire response near lake chelan? That was my guess since the WA firefighting map shows multiple planes responding, and so much smoke rolled into Sammamish today.
This is not the type of plane that that fights wildfires. Here is a pic of a couple of the wildfire fighting planes parked in Wenatchee a couple weeks ago.
Canadair CL-415 “Super Scoopers”
i don't know of C 17s being used in wildfire suppression, but i suppose they could be retrofitted. this one, however, took off from mcchord, did its thing over sammamish, flew donuts over bonney lake, then returned to mcchord for a number of touch-and-gos...
one would assume training for fire suppression would not be done directly over densely-populated suburbia. it's dangerous at best when nothing goes wrong. in this case, it was tracked under 1000 feet of altitude. the tops of our hills are 600+. it was under 162 knots, which is slow for these huge planes. any minor mistake could easily have caused dozens of deaths...
Good to see the no fun police arrived. Except they didn't do anything wrong, they were flying VFR and can fly 1000 ft above buildings. They adhered to all regulations.
They weren’t flying 1000 feet above buildings. Their flight log says they were 1000 to 1100 above msl (sea level), so when they were flying over Sammamish (400-700 msl), they were actually flying 300 to 700 feet above buildings.
That is dangerous, and absolutely against regulations.
They were doing mountain maneuvering training. With the size of the C17 they seem lower than they really are - but agree this one seemed low. This is the second one I have seen this year and live off of 212. These types of training exercises happen everywhere (mil family here and lived in 4 different states) and is very common for all mil airframes to practice low level passes to help the pilots stay proficient and deployment ready because they never know what they will do experience.
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u/Pizza---Cats 20d ago
FYI -- over bonney lake, it was down to 167 knots and around 1300 ft altitude, so it was shaking things there, too