For the past several weeks, a plane has repeatedly flown over the New River in Southwest Virginia.
The small single engine plane first arrived in Virginia on November 9th, according to air traffic control data posted on the website FlightAware. It has made more than a dozen flights up and down the New River, most often landing at the Virginia Tech Montgomery Executive Airport.
“All that we really know is that they are mapping the bottom of the New River,” said Jeremy Porterfield, a lineman at the airport. “They fly probably 3500-4000 feet in a holding pattern back and forth over the river, and that’s basically all that we really know about what’s going on.”
The plane is registered to a company based in Delaware called Randigo. Very little information is available online about the company. Randigo’s owner, Paul Rossouw, confirmed in a message on LinkedIn that a large engineering company subcontracted Randigo and his other company, Revolution Flight, to map the New River. He didn’t say who hired him, and didn’t know the purpose of mapping the river. Rossouw said the green light is from a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scanner that scans the river bottom to get the underwater topography of the river.
Similar sightings of a plane registered to Randigo were noticed earlier this year off the Florida Gulf Coast.
Radio IQ reached out to several federal agencies to find out if hired Randigo, and neither the Army Corps of Engineers nor the United States Geological Survey know about the project.
