The first thing I heard yesterday morning after turning on the radios was DOVE 1 with Jacksonville Center on 126.125. I hadn’t heard DOVE used before, so I started looking up the callsign and checking ADS-B Exchange to see who it might be. While I was doing that, I started hearing more DOVE callsigns with Jacksonville Center. When I searched for DOVE callsigns on ADS-B Exchange, there were a multitude of them going southbound over South Carolina and Georgia.

When I started looking at the aircraft, I noticed that they were all Cessna, Beechcraft, and Hawker business/private planes. Some web research quickly turned up the Textron Aviation Special Olympics Airlift. All of the aircraft using the DOVE callsigns were corporate and privately owned aircraft manufactured by Textron companies whose owners were donating their aircraft, fuel, and pilots to fly Special Olympians and their coaches to the Special Olympics in Orlando, FL. Later in the morning, you could see them all converging on Orlando.

Over the course of the morning, 25 of the flights came within my range on 126.125, 132.425, 133.300, 134.975, and 135.975 with Jacksonville Center:

DOVE 1 (C56X, N902FH, Coca Cola)
DOVE 9 (BE30, N252HR, Johnson Breeders Inc)
DOVE 10 (C510, N26SQ, Gold Star Aviation Inc)
DOVE 11 (C525, N242ML, Skysouth Aviatin Inc)
DOVE 12 (C525, N188SB, Technology Concepts & Design Inc)
DOVE 13 (C525, N247BG, Cornerstone Air LLC)
DOVE 14 (C25B, N415RB, Twin County Aviation LLC)
DOVE 15 (C25B, N5KJ, KJ Leasing LLC)
DOVE 16 (C25B, N590CJ, Textron Aviation)
DOVE 17 (H25B, N902MS, MSI Aviation LLC)
DOVE 18 (C56X, N790TX, Egret Flyers LLC)
DOVE 19 (C525, N614GG, Tannelle Ltd)
DOVE 21 (nothing to correlate on Mode-S/ADS-B)
DOVE 24 (C525, N815MC, Efficiency Aloft LLC)
DOVE 26 (C56X, N336RJ, Six Star Inc)
DOVE 27 (C25B, N8WC, New Oxford Leasing LLC)
DOVE 28 (C25B, N525FM, Frank Ai Leasing LLC)
DOVE 33 (C68A, N58WE, Whelen Engineering Inc)
DOVE 35 (C750, N509CX, Textron Inc)
DOVE 36 (C750, N515CX, EZ Go Division of Textron Inc)
DOVE 38 (C25B, N622MG, Two Winds Aviation LLC)
DOVE 39 (C25C, N525PZ, Zeliff Aivation LLC)
DOVE 40 (C25B, C-GSLW, Flightpath Charter Airways Inc)
DOVE 41 (C25C, N700GD, JEM Aviation LLC)
DOVE 42 (C56X, N318XL, Textron Aviation Inc)

This was something good to hear early on a Saturday morning and it’s great to see Textron and their customers supporting something like the Special Olympics on this level.