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Aircraft Detection with Surface-draped Fiber Optic Cable

Aircraft generate sound waves that travel long distances and can be recorded by both optical fiber sensing technologies (e.g., distributed acoustic sensing, DAS) and by surface-deployed seismographs. These signals permit the remote and independent monitoring of flight activity in areas of limited radar coverage. Recent studies have utilized underground telecommunications fiber (Gurevich et al., 2025) and surface-deployed snow-sited seismometers (Seppi et al., 2025). We demonstrate the ability to record aircraft signals with surface-draped fiber. This method is useful for rapid deployment in environments not suitable for buried fiber or other more demanding deployment scenarios. During the OSIRIS-REx field campaign, a T-shaped surface-draped fiber was deployed at an airfield in Eureka, Nevada. Three days of DAS recordings with a gauge length of 5 m reveal aircraft signatures in the frequency range of 30 to 100 Hz. Observations of several single-engine aircraft maneuvers were logged during the field campaign. Spectrogram features with potential signatures of distant aircraft activity were classified using a recently published spectral comb catalog of aircraft signals derived from seismic network observations (Seppi et al., 2025). This spectral-based classification was cross-referenced with aircraft types listed in historical radar flight tracking data. Our work demonstrates a novel method for detecting aircraft using surface-draped fiber that is useful for signal detection in austere environments and for identifying and filtering aircraft noise from other datasets.

Session: Evolving Frontiers in Explosion Monitoring and Source Physics - I

Type: Oral

Room: Ballroom H

Date: 4/16/2026

Presentation Time: 11:15 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Elisa McGhee

Student Presenter: Yes

Invited Presentation: 

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Additional Authors