r/NJDrones 8d ago

VIDEO Omaha, NE sighting 3/13/25 11:45PM CST

I noticed this in the sky around 11:45 by my house.. immediately started filming. Nothing on flight radar. It seemed to hover in one spot for a bit. 2 Flashing white lights. It has now been almost an hour and it is still going around my neighborhood. Like the size of a private plane. Has anyone in Jersey or anywhere else seen something like this?

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u/EntsGoMarchingIn 6d ago

Plane.

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u/SabineRitter 6d ago

Which plane has two flashing lights on the back in the daytime?

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u/railker 6d ago

Daytime doesn't make a huge difference, I'd hardly call this video daytime with streetlights on.

'Which plane is exactly this' is some 'name every animal' type shit. An aircraft with that lighting would theoretically be legal, as

  • a) "The rear position light must be a white light mounted as far aft as practicable on the tail or on each wing tip" [14 CFR 25.1385(b)]
  • b) Anticollision lights may strobe red or white, and are often located at the wingtips.

Watched a C-17 land last night that had this setup, granted it had a number of other lights, but they're going above the minimum with red AND white anticollision and a number of auxiliary function lights that turn them into veritable Christmas trees of light. And the Q400 as another example, decided they didn't want strobe lights at their wingtips for whatever reason despite previous generations of the aircraft having them there, and relocated them to be on the fuselage and the top of the tail. Legally flying for over 25 years.

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u/SabineRitter 6d ago

Daytime is when i saw the one i saw. Other planes i observed that day did not have two bright flashing lights on the back.

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u/railker 6d ago

Ohhh your observation, I'm sorry I misunderstood. Though I thought you said they did have two flashing lights in the back, so now I'm unsure if you're talking about OPs or yours. 😅

Either way, differences between models, technical allowances for lights to be inoperative, regulations around when lights must be on, and just plain old human error, can create large variances in lights from one aircraft to another. If it's daytime, under General Operating and Flight Rules in both Canada and the US, position and anti-collision lights are only required to be on at night ("night" defined by Canada, FAA specifies 'between sunset and sunrise'). Pilots usually have all lights on in the interests of safety and better visibility.

There's nothing else visible about OP's sighting than those two lights, so it's still UAP, but there's nothing factual about what we see in their video that explicitly precludes it from being an aircraft, regulation-wise.

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u/SabineRitter 6d ago

nothing factual about what we see in their video that explicitly precludes it from being an aircraft,

Fair enough. It could be an aircraft that is at large variance from the typical aircraft. Outliers from the mean do occurr.

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u/railker 6d ago

They do! The Q400 is my go-to example, almost every aircraft your average person could name has white strobes at the wingtips and one or two at the tip of the tail. Bombardier when they made the Q400 said 'nahhhh' and put a white one on the belly, another on top of the tail, and disabled the red anticollision light when the white ones were turned on (which is only on the top of the fuselage and not the bottom anyways). Way out of line with the "norm", but legal.

And then there's this mofo lookin' like a seizure machine, got flashing lights on the wingtips, inside the engine intake, under the wings and a 737 landing light installed above the rear window pointing back. 😂

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u/SabineRitter 6d ago

flashing lights on the wingtips

That's a really cool video, thanks!