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https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/qs101

Here's the flight path of one recent occurrence taken from a plane tracking site. The spine of the butterfly is the runway of an airport.

Flight path of QS101

Here's a height profile, showing that the plane descends over runway and then lifts up again, and does this over and over again.

Height profile of flight QS101

What's possibly going on?

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    $\begingroup$ aviation.stackexchange.com/a/54769/66887 This answer should help, it's a practice procedure $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 23 at 10:15
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    $\begingroup$ You can see similar in for example this incident reconstruction/commentary video from mentour pilor (no affiliation other than me liking his videos on this stuff) youtube.com/watch?v=04M63B1sv_Y of training certification gone very wrong through arcane combination of failure modes and non-standard usage of the aircraft. :) (plus it describes the requirements for trainee pilots nicely) $\endgroup$
    – mishan
    Commented Sep 24 at 11:18
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    $\begingroup$ And I do now realize that "spine of a butterfly" is a nonsense from the point of view of biology. $\endgroup$
    – user7610
    Commented Sep 25 at 7:30

1 Answer 1

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This is most likely a training or pilot certification flight.

The "butterfly" you see is a standard traffic pattern flown on pretty much any airport / -field when doing visual landings.

The pilot is either doing touch and go landings where the plane briefly touches down on the runway and takes off again, or low approches during which the pilot performs a go around maneuver before touchdown.

Brno runway elevation is about 800ft / 240m, so given the resolution and accuracy of the FRA24 data, this could be either one of the aforementiond, or a mix of both.

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