If your house is near an airfield or army base, then you already know why planes constantly fly over your home.
If you did not live near one of these locations, then keep reading, and I hope I can help you find out why this happens in your particular case.
There are a couple of reasons that determine that airplanes are to fly over a specific location repeatedly.
You should identify the type of planes flying over your property. Most of the time, they will be either commercial or military aircraft.
Commercial or Passenger Planes
You need to understand that commercial planes travel along specific paths.
This happens for many reasons, from fuel economy to avoiding no-fly zones. If you are annoyed by the constant flights over your property, remember that flight paths might change over time.
Airlines plan paths for their planes using a simple rule:
The less time the plane stays in the air, the less fuel it consumes.
It’s not uncommon that dozens of planes fly the same route in the same twenty-four hour interval and thus fly over the same locations.
Commercial planes are not the only ones using them. Small private aircraft tend to take the same routes.
If your house is below one of these paths, then aircraft will buzz your property at least a couple of times a day. This leads us to the next question.
How to find out if your house is below an aircraft highway?
From your PC, head over to https://www.flightradar24.com. If you have a smartphone, you can download their app, which is available for both Ios and Android.
Locate your house on the map and look at all the planes flying over it. Tapping or clicking on the plane icons will show their paths.
If you see more planes on the same flight path over your house, congratulations, you just discovered the answer to your question.
Your house is not on a flight path. What now?
Sometimes, even if your house is not on an air route, commercial planes will still fly over your property in large numbers.
This happens because, when the nearest airport gets flooded with airplanes, it takes longer and longer for runaways to clear, so the planes need to wait in the air.
When a commercial plane is forced to wait in the air, it flies in what is called a holding pattern.
One runway needs about four minutes to clear before a new plane can land.
Especially during summer and holidays, air traffic increases exponentially and more planes end up flying in holding patterns –source.
If your house is below a holding pattern, then every time the air traffic increases, so does the number of planes flying over your place.
Another interesting fact is that the flight controller sets the airplanes on the same holding pattern but at different altitudes when the airport is congested. From below, it looks like dozens of planes are constantly flying over.
Military planes
If you are wondering why military planes keep flying over your house, the reasons might not be as straightforward as you may think.
Military planes usually don’t follow paths and routes like commercial planes, so it wouldn’t make sense to fly over a specific location repetitively, yet they constantly do this.
Military pilots are intensively trained to respond to specific threats or execute missions.
If military planes suddenly start buzzing your area, here’s what I think happened.
Once a new threat emerges, let’s say from a big country in Northern Asia, the people that train the pilots must do everything in their power to train the pilots to deal with this threat.
They start searching for a location that mimics the relief and weather of that specific country.
Once a suitable location is selected, pilots begin training in that area, and military pilots will rotate until all of them reach a certain level of training.
Because pilots need to complete a specific mission, they take the same route repeatedly.
Usually, military planes will fly over a location until an adequate number of pilots are trained.
Then, sooner or later, they will leave your area and the number of flights will be significantly reduced.
How to stop planes from flying over your house
There is little you can do about this. Airlines have no obligation to change their flight paths.
Additionally, everything above five hundred feet is considered public domain and, unless it is a military zone, is controlled by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
You can ask airlines to alter their flight routes, but the chance of them actually listening to your request is slim to none.
Rarely, you might get more luckily with the military in this case, but you will need to do a little work.
Write a letter, signed by most of your neighbors, to the nearest airbase and ask them to alter the military flight paths to avoid your location by a couple of miles.
They might or may not accept your request, but at least you tried. Don’t forget to specify why you want their planes to alter their course.
You could also ask the local authorities to step in.
Why is Wi-Fi not working when a plane flies over your house?
If Wi-Fi is not working when a plane flies over your house, it means that the electronic devices aboard the airplane are interfering with the frequencies of your Wi-Fi router.
Before blaming the Wi-Fi aboard the airplanes, you should know that all commercial airplanes turn off the Wi-Fi once the plane descends below nine thousand feet.
Modern planes use altimeters that constantly bombard the land under them with signals in the 4.2 to 4.4 GHz range to get the aircraft’s altitude in real-time. An aircraft altimeter works like a submarine sonar.
Most of the time, the 5 GHz frequency gets interference from the aircraft, meaning that you are using a Wi-Fi 5.
If you have a weak connection on your smartphone or laptop, this will be enough to temporarily mess up your signal. When an airplane flies really low, even TV signals are affected.
How do you solve this problem?
I suggest first trying a Wi-Fi 6 router since these routers work in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. You should also check to see if your laptop or smartphone works in the 2.4 GHz range for this strategy to be effective.
If you already have a Wi-Fi 6 router, you need to change the setting on your smartphone or laptop to only work in the 2.4 GHz range.
Remember that not all electronic devices support both 2.4Ghz and 5 GHz. Usually, cheap smartphones don’t support dual-band.
If this doesn’t work, try placing the router next to your smartphone or laptop. The closer they are to each other, the harder it is for an external source to interfere with the signal.
Buying a more powerful router and an external Wi-Fi antenna for the laptop might also help. Of course, it all depends on how low the planes fly over your house.
If none of these ideas work, you should consider only using the laptop on a wired connection.
If mobility is important to you, then installing a Faraday cage in your house might be a solution.
You can also try a Faraday shield by installing chicken wire between the ceiling and the roof of your house.
Don’t forget to ground this “shield” by connecting it to your electrical ground wire; otherwise, the “shield” will not be effective.
