An unmanned aircraft that stays up for over a day at 60,000 feet. Live RQ-4 Global Hawk positions.
No RQ-4 Global Hawk is transmitting ADS-B at the moment.
Military aircraft are not obliged to broadcast, so this happens regularly. The count refreshes every thirty seconds.
Nothing of this type is up right now.
The Global Hawk flies higher and longer than almost anything else on this site. It has no crew, cruises above 55,000 feet, and can stay airborne for more than thirty hours, which lets a single aircraft watch one area continuously for longer than any manned reconnaissance aircraft could manage.
It transmits ADS-B, and its FORTE-callsign flights over the Black Sea became some of the most widely followed tracks of recent years. NATO operates its own fleet of RQ-4Ds, called Phoenix, from Sigonella in Sicily, and those aircraft cover the Mediterranean and eastern Europe.
The airframe is strange to look at: an enormous slender wing, a bulbous nose housing satellite communications, and a V-tail. There is no cockpit, because there is nobody aboard.
Planespotters photograph aircraft at airports, and an unmanned aircraft that operates from a handful of military bases and never carries passengers is very rarely in front of a camera. We would rather show nothing than a picture of something else.
Over thirty hours. That endurance, combined with an altitude above 55,000 feet, is the whole reason the type exists: one aircraft can watch an area for more than a day without a crew to relieve.
A NATO-owned fleet of five RQ-4D Phoenix aircraft based at Sigonella in Sicily, providing surveillance for the alliance as a shared asset rather than a national one.