Mystery night flights baffle city
If you’ve ever been camping, the sound would be distressingly familiar: a mosquito buzzing freely inside your tent, its whereabouts very clearly somewhere nearby but impossible to pin down in the dark.
“You know it’s there, but you don’t know where,” Lynn Purvis said over the phone from Kingston, Ont. Nor do you know when it’ll go away.
The mosquito Purvis had in mind on Monday wasn’t real, but it did serve as a useful analogy for an experience that has mystified scores of Kingstonians in the past few weeks. Starting in the evening and continuing for hours in the dead of night, a propeller plane detectable only by the noise it emits keeps circling above the city, waking light sleepers and prompting residents to log their observations of the aircraft on social media.
There, the people of Kingston take solace in their shared befuddlement. Why do they hear the plane on the weekends and at 3 a.m.? Why, last Wednesday night, did it buzz for nearly four hours in the vicinity of Purvis’ home north of downtown? Whose plane is it, they ask, and what in the world is the pilot up to?
“I would love to know what it is,” Purvis said. “I’ve never heard anything like this before.”
Those questions have gone unanswered all month long, mostly because no authority has stepped forward to claim ownership of the plane or to share any insight about its assignment. Amid that void, amateur sleuths trying to crack the mystery can only go off impassioned firsthand descriptions of the din, which can be contradictory or short on crucial details.
“The commonality seems to be that the aircraft has a high-pitched motor sound. Not a jet — definitely some kind of propeller plane,” said Steffan Watkins, an IT security consultant from rural Ottawa who tracks military planes and ships in his spare time. Some witnesses are certain the plane has only one engine. Others swear it has two.
“If, at least, we knew what (type of) plane it was or what organization it was, we could guess,” said Watkins, who has spent, by his admission, “too many hours” trying to identify the plane after a Kingston couple messaged him about the case a week ago.
For the moment, Watkins admits, he’s stumped: “It could literally be anything, and it could be (flying) for any reason.” For good measure, he floated several possibilities — a personal drone someone only flies at night; a Canadian Forces drone from the base in Trenton, Ont.; a Pilatus PC-12 single-engine turboprop, which, like American law enforcement agencies, the RCMP may be using for aerial surveillance — with the caveat that he doesn’t have evidence to support any theory.
Contacted by the Post on Monday, the City of Kingston and the local airport each said they had no information about the plane. Transport Canada, the federal department that sets transportation policies, said it didn’t have enough information to identify the aircraft.
A city spokesperson said airport staff had directed her to refer inquiries to the RCMP, which declined to say if the plane belongs to them.
At CFB Trenton, the Canadian Forces’ centre for air operations, public affairs officer Capt. Graeme Scott said the plane Purvis reported hearing over Kingston last Wednesday night didn’t come from his base.
“Sorry I couldn’t solve this mystery,” Scott said.
It remains to be seen how long the plane will continue to irritate and perplex the people of Kingston. One resident, Doug Stewart, told the Kingston Whig-Standard last week that he had heard it every night since the start of January. A coworker of Purvis’ who lives west of downtown observed the noise for the first time last Thursday evening.
Purvis, for her part, is still preoccupied with the hours over which she heard the plane buzzing overhead last Wednesday night.
“At one point, it was low enough (that) I thought, ‘I should be able to see it,’ ” she said. “But there was nothing.”
From his home about 150 km north of Kingston, meanwhile, Watkins said he plans to forge on with his search for an answer.
“It seems like a no-brainer we should be able to figure this out, but it’s evidently proving more difficult — which is good, because if I, a random guy on the internet, could plug in a transponder receiver and pick it up, we’d think that’d be really s---ty security,” he said.
“That I can’t easily do it is good. But that just makes me annoyed.”