British police explain the 'obscene' helicopter trail on the flight map

The flight path of an NPAS police helicopter over Hampshire formed a phallic figure on a flight-tracking service. A local resident complained about the noise and the waste of resources, but the service said the crew was searching for a car and the route was random.

Aziz KarimovFirst published on tafs uz 5 November 2026 at 17:372 min read

The key facts

The NPAS helicopter circled over Hampshire at around 11 p.m. and woke the two-year-old daughter of 53-year-old Gordon Bird
The figure on the map took shape in about half an hour, with the aircraft circling over the area for 15–20 minutes
NPAS denies any intent: the crew was helping to search for a car that had failed to stop when requested by police

A noise complaint led to an unusual discovery on a flight map

British police had to publicly explain their helicopter's flight path after it formed the outline of a phallic symbol on a flight-tracking service. Metro reports on the incident citing a complaint from a local resident. A helicopter from the National Police Air Service (NPAS) was operating overnight into November 5 over Hampshire near Blackbushe Airport: at around 11 p.m., the noise of the aircraft woke the two-year-old daughter of 53-year-old Gordon Bird, who then opened a flight-tracking service to find out what was going on.

What the map showed and how NPAS responded

According to Bird, the helicopter circled over his neighbourhood for about 15–20 minutes, and the entire unusual figure of loops and turns took shape over roughly half an hour. The man admitted that what outraged him was not so much the drawing itself as the possible senseless waste of police resources. NPAS, however, statedthat the pilot had not depicted anything of the sort intentionally: at the time, the crew was helping ground officers search for a car whose driver had failed to stop when requested by police. The service explained that police helicopters do not follow pre-planned routes during such operations — the direction changes depending on what is happening on the ground — so the resemblance of the flight path to an obscene figure was called a random coincidence.

Context

This is not the first time an aircraft's flight path has attracted attention for its shape: it was previously reported that a pilot in the United States used his plane's trajectory over Missouri to 'draw' Munch's The Scream, while another drew the Mona Lisa over Arkansas. Separately, Life.ru previously wrote about another route flown by British aviation: a Boeing RC-135W reconnaissance aircraft circled for a long time over the Black Sea, making loops and turns — that event is not connected to the incident in Hampshire.