Hey gang,

First the quick note - I've never seen sun dogs before and yet I saw one on two separate days this week. Pretty cool. I took pictures on my cell but it didn't come out good at all.

The main point of the thread - as I'm looking at the sun dog this afternoon I realize that there are some helicopters hovering over Oakland, PA. We're used to medivac helicopters so I usually ignore them but today there were two non-medivac helicopters with surveillance equipment hovering in one place for quite some time. I went up to the top of the hill - you can see up and down the Mon River really well from Homestead to the south all the way up to Downtown Pittsburgh and farther north - and there are 6-7 helicopters, all hovering in a line up the river. Not military but not media or medivac either. There was a huge unmarked plane flying very low over downtown and circling. After a few minutes it headed North West.

Sometimes helicopters are used to clear airspace for dignitaries/elite flights out of local airports. This plane most likely came out of Allegheny County Airport.

I called my brother who was traveling back to PA from Indiana on business to tell him about it. He saw the same thing over Columbus but there were four planes, all unmarked.

Anyone else see something in their area, or notice a movement of planes out of county/private airports?