Local

In D.C., a resident tracks the flying machines hovering above on the city’s ‘helicopter highway’

By Justin Wm. Moyer
November 20, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EST

D.C. resident Andrew Logan calls his neighborhood the city’s “helicopter highway.” Some evenings, whirlybirds of unknown origin seem to descend en masse. ... “There were a lot of nights where I’d wake up and these things were circling or buzzing us real low,” said Logan, who lives in the Shaw neighborhood. “I naturally turned to Twitter to see what they were. There was not a whole lot there.”

Logan, an audio engineer by day, was quick to remedy that. At the start of the year, he launched the Twitter handle @HelicoptersofDC as a clearinghouse for all things chopper-related. Now more than 7,700 followers strong, the account uses publicly available data to identify the sources of all that buzzing, often tweeting out photos of the choppers.

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Brooks, a D.C. resident and employee of the General Services Administration, started the website Helicopters of DC in 2019 during the government shutdown. (Logan said Brooks was “not at all offended that I stole his name,” and Brooks said he considers Logan a collaborator.) Like its Twitter counterpart, the site identifies aircraft, explaining which agencies are behind which birds and their missions.

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Alan Henney, a longtime chronicler of police chatter who often beats traditional media to crime stories on Twitter, said HelicoptersofDC “ties it all together.” The account provides a basic service every citizen is interested in: When someone looks up and sees something in the sky, they want to know what it is and why it’s there.

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Justin Wm. Moyer
Justin Wm. Moyer is a breaking news reporter for The Washington Post. After a long stint as a contributing writer at the Washington City Paper, he came to The Post in 2008, becoming an editor in Outlook and for the Morning Mix, The Post's overnight team. He became a reporter in 2015. Follow https://twitter.com/justinwmmoyer