--- title: "The Black Helicopters Are On A Chart You Can Buy For £14" dek: "Military low-level training routes are published, numbered and mapped. We plotted eleven months of reader sighting reports against them. Eighty-one per cent fell within two kilometres of a published route, and the rest are the interesting part." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: The Sky Desk author: Ray "Sunshine" Pell and Ambrose Teague (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T13:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/low-level-routes-chart tags: black helicopters, low-level routes, aviation, charts, Sky Desk genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The Black Helicopters Are On A Chart You Can Buy For £14 *Military low-level training routes are published, numbered and mapped. We plotted eleven months of reader sighting reports against them. Eighty-one per cent fell within two kilometres of a published route, and the rest are the interesting part.* The routes are published. Military low-level training corridors are printed on aeronautical charts, numbered, with their widths drawn. A chart costs about fourteen pounds and any pilot shop will sell you one. We plotted eleven months of reader sighting reports on top of them. > **Figure:** Reader reports against published routes — see https://theyburied.com/article/low-level-routes-chart ## What the overlay shows Two hundred and fourteen reports. One hundred and seventy-three of them — 81 per cent — fell within two kilometres of a published corridor. Where the corridor turns, the reports turn. That is not a subtle statistical finding. It is a picture, and it is the picture in the diagram above. ## The clusters that did not fit Two, and they are the reason this was worth doing. Nineteen reports clustered eight kilometres south of any route, mostly between 22:00 and 04:00. One telephone call to a regional hospital's flight service: night patient transfers, a helipad, a fixed approach from the south. Twenty-two more sat in a line to the north-east that matched nothing. Second call: a utility contractor running a survey under a tender that is published on the county's own website. Both took one call. Neither had been made by anybody before us, including by this desk, which had been receiving these reports for eleven months before it thought to buy a chart. > This desk had been receiving these reports for eleven months before it thought to buy a chart. > > — from the method note ## The nine Nine reports we could not place at all. They are in the published data, flagged, and they are staying there. Rounding nine unexplained reports into a 96-per-cent success rate would have been easy and would have been the same crime this desk accuses everybody else of. ## What we wrote to the readers All 214 people who sent a report were written back to individually, which took our correspondent three weekends and which he would like recorded as the least enjoyable part of the exercise. The letter said the same thing to everybody: here is the chart, here is the route nearest you, here is your report on it, and here is what to do if it does not fit. Forty-one wrote back. Most said some version of *oh*. Four sent better reports the following month, with times and bearings, because they now knew what would be useful. One wrote a sentence this desk has pinned up: "You could have told us about the chart at any point in the last eleven months." He is right. It cost fourteen pounds. ## Sources (invented) - Published low-level route charts, Commercially available aeronautical charts — Bought at the ordinary price and plotted (2026) - 214 readers, Who sent sighting reports — Reports logged with date, time, place and description (Sept 2025 – Jul 2026) - A regional hospital's flight service, Named in our notes — Telephone (June 2026) - A utility contractor, Named in our notes — Telephone; supplied its published survey tender (June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2041: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2041 ## What we could not confirm - Nine reports we could not place. They are in the published data, flagged, and we would rather print nine unexplained than round them away. - Whether the routes are always flown as charted. They are corridors, not lines, and traffic within them is not published in advance. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.