Recently a poster uploaded a video of a UFO filmed from a car driven by his aunt on the run between Stony Rapids and Fond du Lac in northern Saskatchewan (an ice road, at least partially). I’m ~95% certain this video shows an ATR 42 in the circuit at Stony Rapids airport.
Logic as follows:
1) The route from Stony Rapids and Fond du Lac runs south of the Stony Rapids airport. The light blue arrow indicates the road, Google nicely labeled the airport itself. Someone driving from Stony Rapids to Fond du Lac would be going westward, putting the airport out the passenger side window. This is exactly what we see in the video. Even the distance seems right, it’s about 1.5 to 2k away, which matches the video:
An aircraft landing on runway 24 would thus be seen from its starboard side and thus be displaying a green navigation light. A green navigation light is clearly seen in the video:
2) The aircraft has a lit up tail. That is because airliners, even small regonal ones, have lights on the tail to light up the logo painted on the tail section. They even call them “logo lights”. That gets us to airliner, but not which particular type. However, we can also see some other distinguishing features. For one, the aircraft appears to have a T-tail, which gets us to ATR, DASH-8 or King Air/Beech 1900. It eliminates other common small airliners seen in the area like the Saab 340 and Twin Otters. We can also see the wing is at the top of the fuselage, which eliminates the King Air and 1900. We can see the lower section of the fuselage is lit by the landing lights, which means ATR because the DASH (and Q400) have their landing lights on the wing. All of that gets us to this:
This particular image isn’t aligned correctly, so poking about I found one on the commons that is close enough for comfort and produced this:
The red line shows the T-tail. I didn’t have room, but if you look at the base of the vertical stabilizer you can see it has an extension like the one in the lower image. The orange line shows the vertical stabilizer lit up by the logo lights. The yellow line shows the position of the navigation lights. The green line is the lower fuselage being lit by the landing lights, which are just visible as the small black area in the lower image. The blue line is the cockpit, which is easily visible in the image.
Given the apparently altitude, the aircraft is on short final, probably right about where the inner marker would be if this had ILS (it does not, only an NDB).
3) Rise Air had an ATR 42 flying out of Stony Rapids the next day:
Rise Air schedule for winter 2023/24
Now, two things to point out that do not “fit”:
a) the OP stated it was 2 AM when this happened. One can think of a number of reasons an aircraft was flying around at night, but at 2AM when the flight isn’t for hours? It’s possible they were just replacing a tire or something and doing a check ride. Or 2 AM might be when the car arrived in Fond du Lac, which would mean they left Stony Rapids hours earlier. The last flight out or in is around 5:30, which might be this dark (it’s way north!), but the timing doesn’t seem to totally match.
b) there are two navigation lights visible, slightly separated. The image of the lighting plan is “typical”, suggesting some variation in the field, but looking at the images on the Rise Air web page, all of the ones I see have a single light. This one may suggest it is not an ATR but a Beech of some sort, which sometimes do have two lights, but that has a low wing (but T-tail) and the landing light is normally at the front (maybe not in later models). So that’s the 5% I’m not sure of.
submitted by /u/maurymarkowitz
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