P-8 Poseidon
ICAO P8A 737 rebuilt to hunt submarines. Its patrol patterns are visible on ADS-B — see which P-8s are working an area right now.
Flying right now
Live · 30sAirframe
- Manufacturer
- Boeing
- Role
- Maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare
- Class
- L2J — Landplane, 2 jet engines
- Crew
- 9
- First flight
- 25 April 2009
- In service
- 2013
Operators airborne
About the P-8 Poseidon
The P-8 is built on a 737-800 airframe, which is why it looks so ordinary until you notice what it is doing. Maritime patrol produces a distinctive track: long straight legs at low level over water, tight repeating patterns over one patch of sea, and hours spent nowhere near an airway.
That makes it one of the more interesting types to watch. A P-8 orbiting a specific stretch of the Baltic, the Black Sea or the eastern Mediterranean is a piece of open-source information in a way that a transport crossing the Atlantic is not, and these flights are frequently reported precisely because they are visible.
It has largely replaced the turboprop P-3 Orion. Eight countries now fly it, including the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, India, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea alongside the US Navy.
Callsign prefixes
- PS
- US Navy patrol squadron callsigns often begin with a squadron code
- RRR
- Ascot — Royal Air Force Poseidon MRA1
- GAF
- German Navy
How to recognise it
- —A 737 with raked wingtips instead of blended winglets, and no cabin windows aft of the forward doors.
- —A weapons bay behind the wing and hardpoints under the rear fuselage.
- —On the feed, the track is the tell: low altitude over water, in patterns no airliner would ever fly.
Common questions
+ Why do P-8s fly such strange patterns?
Those are search patterns. Expanding squares, creeping lines and long straight legs at low level are how an area of ocean is covered systematically, and they are also how sonobuoy fields get laid and monitored.
+ Is the P-8 really a Boeing 737?
It is built on the 737-800 fuselage with 737-900 wings, on the same production line, then substantially modified — reinforced structure, a weapons bay, and a fuselage sealed for low-level flight over salt water.
+ Do P-8s always transmit ADS-B?
No. Crews can and do turn the transponder off, particularly on sensitive sorties. What you see here is the traffic that chooses to be visible, which is a substantial share of training and transit flying but not all operational work.