Yesterday evening, a private aircraft performed a weird circle pattern around North Canyon High School. Here, they seemingly went around in circles over 6 times. This strange behavior was recorded on the website FlightRadar24 which captures all plane activity and documents flights.

With this being said, it’s understandable that this flight pattern confused a lot of Phoenix locals. As a result, you may have speculated as to what was going on. Interestingly, the pattern has a pretty mundane explanation and isn’t as intriguing as it may first seem.

It turns out that this is actually a news helicopter. As seen with the registration on the FAAs website, this is registered to US Helicopters Inc. which leases helicopters to news stations. Specifically, this was used to get shots of the local college football game from above. You may think that this is a bit much for a regular college game but if it fits into the budget then so be it. As seen with the above screenshot, this aircraft was a helicopter too, so this theory certainly checks out. If nothing else, this is a good example of using common sense to look at strange anomalies, and sometimes, the truth is more ordinary than fiction.