A military transport helicopter overflying Toronto on Tuesday had many asking questions, and several took to social media to theorize — some jumping to some pretty wild conclusions — about the possible reasons behind this flight.

The Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) CH-147F Chinook passed over several local neighbourhoods like Riverdale and Regent Park, and made multiple runs along the city's lakefront.

Two separate Reddit threads sought answers about the flight, which was not visible on flight radar tracking sites and appeared to be flying with its transponder turned off — typical of military aircraft.

Spotted today over Regent Park
byu/rubyjrouge intoronto

One since-deleted Reddit post misidentified the aircraft as a Boeing AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, which is not operated by Canadian Forces. While this could have caused a few to panic, many were quick to highlight this mistake, and the thread has since been removed.

Others wondered if the flight was in some way related to a fatal shooting in the Regent Park area, though several commenters shut down this theory. One user offered up the most likely explanation, that this was probably a training flight from Canadian Forces Base Trenton.

Comment
byu/rubyjrouge from discussion
intoronto

It's not the first time social media users have debated the origin of a mysterious helicopter flight over Toronto.

Almost three years ago, people took to social media to discuss a mysterious flight of black helicopters flying in a V formation over the city. That ominous formation turned out to be a simple private charter flight operated by Great Lakes Helicopter, shuttling VIPs to a venue in the city.