C-12J (VOODOO1) and U-28 regulars at private Colorado airport

Over the past couple of months, Air Force SpecOps has been frequenting Centennial Airport (KAPA) in suburban Colorado. My office has a prime view of the runways, so I'm used to watching the fancy private jets and single engine props taking off, but over the past few weeks some interesing aircraft have shown up. The U-28 has been a regular customer, unfortunately I cannot find any tracking information on it in the public domain. It has come and gone a few times a week, however today it performed touch & go's for close to two hours (and all I have are some crappy cell phone shots; I can make them available if you want, but beware as they are extra crappy).
The airport has a nice restaurant that I frequent, and a couple of days ago on the 12th, a C-12J showed up while I was there for lunch. I had been browsing the KAPA page on flightaware on my phone, and to my surprise its flight from Holloman AFB had been registered under the callsign "VOODOO1." The page had a list of its previous flights to Tinker AFB, Holloman AFB & LAX etc. but I didn't think to screencap the page, and now that information is inaccessable. Here is a screencap from this morning of its round trip flight from Holloman on the 12th:

The whole VOODOO1 callsign obviously piqued my interest, so I'm just curious if anybody else has any information or stories on encounters with the C-12J & U-28.

Voodoo1 is a callsign used by 3 planes. There is a radar test bed aircraft out of LAX that uses the same callsign. I forget the other plane. The Beechcraft plane you are seeing has also flown to Creech AFB. I have a thread on ATS about this. www.abovetopsecret.com...

It is well worth eyeballing this plane since not much is known about it.

Not to stray too much from the original post, but this C-12 is a classic case of "hiding in plain sight." The DoD has plenty of aircraft that have civilian counterparts so that they don't stand out as being special, well except for a pod here or there. The MC-12 and RC-12 are prime examples. Well the RC-12 is kind of hard to hide since it has too much stuff attached to it.

Thanks for your insight, gariac. I have always appreciated your extensive knowledge of DoD operations, and I love your website. I did see your post about the C-12J flying out of Creech into New Mexico etc. Why do you think they allow the public to track some of their flights? I have yet to see an MC/RC-12 (seeing an RC-12 in person would probably kill me from curiosity), but it is interesting becasue the armed forces seem to frequent KAPA on a regular basis. I have seen V-22s, F-16s, F/A-18s, T-6As, UH-60s, OH-58s, CH-47s and C-23Cs which is strange to me becasue Buckley AFB is only ten miles north of here. I have a couple of buddies that work at Buckley, but they stay tight-lipped regardless of how many drinks have been had.

reply to post by A T K


I don't get the military playing at civilian airports either, other than it may be less of a hassle to get flight clearance if you are not a unit at that nearby military base. Or in the case of some programs, the civilian contractors don't want to deal with the hassles of working on a military base. The RC-12 upgrade development was run out of Mather Field, probably for that reason. The Sacramento area has quite a bit of military use at civilian airports, perhaps because BRAC eliminated the old bases.

The DESC or whatever they call it these days has agreements around the US for fuel purchases at civilian airports, and for civilian aircraft to be able to purchase fuel on military bases.

OK, Defense Logistics Agency Energy.
www.energy.dla.mil...

In the case of KAPA, it can be seen on the noise tracker:
webtrak.bksv.com...

Often when you see a military plane at a civilian airport, you can see its flight path on the noise tracking websites. It helps if the plane has mode-s so you can get the squawk code. Then you set the noise tracker to the proper time and poke at the planes on the screen until you get a match.

This website has info on internet plane tracking:
www.inplanesight.org...

If the plane has ADS-B, all the better. Either you track it on your personal mode-s receiver, or one of the internet tracking websites that use such receivers to do real time tracking.

flight radar 24

Flightradar24 is on my hot list since it has real time tracking that covers Palmdale. It has a decent playback mode, though none of these free ADS-B websites are perfect. They miss stuff. For instance, Google did a late night run with one of their private jet they base out of Moffett Federal Airfield (KNUQ). You can enter N1757 on flightradar24 to see the flight. However, it didn't show it landing at LAX, nor did it catch the plane landing at KNUQ after 1AM! [We're Google. We don't need no stinkin' badges and noise abatement rules don't apply to billionaires. OH, and if we do it, it isn't evil because Google does no evil.]

On flightradar24, the planes are two colors. The yellow planes are real time and if the plane participates in the BARR program (flight blocking), it shows up anyway. [Under options, you can turn off the FAA feed and only see real time tracking.] If you put N1757 into flightaware, you will see that it is blocked. [Hey, we're Google. We spy on you, but don't you spy on us. Oh, and we aren't evil.]

There are mode-s receivers in the $100 range, but software is an issue. They all copy Kinetics port 30003 messaging, so some people use that God awful planeplotter program to view the data. I'm going to get around to investigating some of the other free port 30003 programs, but haven't done so yet. For real time use, you could just feed flightradar24 then watch over the internet if the plane has ADS-B. The only military planes that routinely fly with ADS-B on are the E-6 Mercury.

There is also planefinder.net, but the interface is just crap. You need to turn off a lot of the features to get anything remotely useful.

Interesting, thanks for all that information. It will take some time to look through, but it should be fun. For some reason I've skipped your commentary on tracking via radio transmissions in favor of looking at your photos on lazygranch...what can I say, I love "plane porn" and you've taken some great photos. I also need to edit my OP; I thought some of VOODOO1's fligh records had mysteriously vanished, while in reality I wasn't logged into my flightaware account and I was viewing limited data.

EDIT: I just realized that the C-12J wasn't ever at LAX or Tinker, that was in fact the 727. It has been a long week.