A dad checked the flight path of the police helicopter that woke his 2-year-old at 11 PM, and found it had traced a rude drawing

Britain’s National Police Air Service has denied that one of its helicopters deliberately traced a rude shape in the sky over Hampshire, England. A resident spotted the phallic outline on a flight-tracking website after the police helicopter circled his neighborhood late Monday night, according to the BBC. The service insists the crew was carrying out a genuine search.

Gordon Bird, 53, of Ancells Farm in Fleet, said the helicopter woke his two-year-old daughter at about 11 p.m. as it flew several circles overhead for at least 15 minutes. As he had not yet gone to bed and still had his computer on, he looked up the flight on a public tracking site. Bird said he was “shocked” by the shape the route had left behind.

According to the tracking data, the helicopter traced the main part of the outline above Blackbushe Airport before circling over Ancells Farm and heading back to its base at Redhill. Bird said the buzzing over his estate lasted 15 to 20 minutes, while the drawing itself took about half an hour of an hour-long flight. The air service quickly pushed back on the idea that any of it was intentional.

The air service says the crew was only looking for a car that wouldn’t stop

NPAS, which provides aerial support to police forces across England and Wales, said the crew was “orbiting the locations they were directed to” while searching for a vehicle that had failed to stop for police. The service added that the crew was checking specific roads, junctions and areas flagged by officers on the ground, in support of Thames Valley Police.

Officials also explained that police helicopter flights do not follow fixed or predetermined flight plans, as crews have to respond to changing and unpredictable circumstances on the ground. In an email to Bird, NPAS said it understood the frustration of having his young daughter disrupted. It acknowledged that it was “unfortunate that the flight path shown on public tracking apps resembles a particular shape.”

Bird, however, said he was not angry. He told the outlet he was upset at what he called a “waste of resources,” adding that police helicopters flying over his home make the house vibrate and the windows rattle. The service maintained that the flight was carried out for a legitimate policing purpose.

Questionable flight paths have landed other crews in trouble before. The Finnish Air Force confirmed this spring that cadets were disciplined after flight trackers showed at least four training planes tracing similar shapes during an April exercise. In 2017, the U.S. Navy held a crew accountable for using a jet’s contrail to draw one in the sky over Washington State.

There has been no suggestion of misconduct by the NPAS crew, however, and the tracking image alone does not show the pattern was deliberate. The police helicopter was hunting a driver who failed to stop, the same kind of pursuit British forces have made light of online before, as when UK police mocked a jailed driver with a GTA-style TikTok edit.

It has not been reported whether officers found the vehicle the police helicopter was searching for that night. NPAS runs a fleet of 19 helicopters and four fixed-wing aircraft, and its crews are called out by forces across England and Wales for searches like this one.

As NPAS flights stay visible on public tracking sites, any future late-night searches over Fleet are likely to get the same close look from residents like Bird.