An aeroplane repeatedly flying over the Brussels-Capital Region for nearly two hours on Tuesday night has kept many of the capital city's residents up with its noise, as well as with questions about what was happening.
Numerous Brussels residents took to Twitter with questions about the noise of aeroplanes. By tracking the plane's flight path on Flightradar, it became clear that the noise came from just one plane, flying across the Capital Region over and over.
The flight was an initiative by two city councillors of the Brussels municipality of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Caroline Lhoir for the ecological transition and Antoine Bertrand for the energy transition. Many, however, seemingly missed the announcements.
"From 10:00, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an infrared thermal camera flew over the municipality. The objective is to establish a diagnosis of heat loss in all private and public buildings," they said in a press release. "The data will enable people to learn about energy management and therefore reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Exceptionally, residents of the Woluwe-Saint-Pierre were asked to heat their homes until midnight so the temperature differences could be clearly observed and they could benefit from the most relevant information on the state of insulation of their homes.
In practice, this means that the plane took infrared photographs of all roofs on the municipality's territory, enabling the authorities to analyse the places where the insulation is less good more precisely, as the images clearly show the temperature difference between the outside and the roofs.
Renovation works
"Without data, it is impossible to act. Data is the starting point," the city councillors said. "This data can then be used to carry out renovation work."
Once all data has been processed, the municipality will publish it on a website dedicated to the project, which residents will be able to consult by using their address, which will receive a colour scale specific to each building, Lhoir and Bertrand said.
Previously, a similar initiative has also been carried out in other Belgian municipalities, such as in the city of Liège, where citizens were informed of the heat loss of their building after a plane with thermal cameras flew overhead.
