A National Police Air Service helicopter searching for a car that had failed to stop for officers near Fleet, Hampshire, late Monday ended up tracing a flight path that, viewed from above, looked unmistakably like male genitalia — and the force says it had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Gordon Bird, 53, was woken shortly before 11 p.m. when the aircraft's rotor noise disturbed his 2-year-old daughter. Irritated, he pulled up a public flight-tracking site to see what the helicopter had been doing overhead for the better part of 20 minutes. What he found, he said, was a looping, circular pattern with two round shapes and a connecting line — a shape he and his neighbors quickly recognized.
The National Police Air Service confirmed to the BBC that the flight occurred but insisted the resemblance was accidental. "The flight was conducted for a legitimate policing purpose, in support of Thames Valley Police," the force said in a statement, adding that the crew was "orbiting the locations they were directed to as part of the search for a vehicle that had failed to stop for police." NPAS said its aircraft "do not follow defined or predetermined flight plans," since pilots respond in real time to instructions from officers on the ground rather than flying a planned route.
It is not the first time a European aerial exercise has produced an inadvertently crude pattern on flight-tracking software. The Finnish Air Force acknowledged in April that cadets were disciplined after at least four aircraft traced a similar shape during a training exercise near Jyväskylä, an episode that drew international attention when aviation enthusiasts spotted it on public tracking maps.
NPAS, which provides air support to the majority of England and Wales' police forces from a shared national fleet, later emailed Bird directly, acknowledging the disruption and calling it "unfortunate that the flight path shown on public tracking apps resembles a particular shape." Thames Valley Police has not said whether the search that prompted the flight was successful.
