It isn't often that one sees a contrail in the sky which indicates that a jet has turned back - it's usually bad news - so when we saw two on Tuesday evening I took a picture. Others also noticed them - see link
here - though their research doesn't seem to have done much to explain the mystery.
Jim Robinson
ReplyDeleteIn the '70s I remember looking up from my home in southern Vermont to see planes at high altitude come from all points of the compass, though not all at once, and make a 90 degree turn in relatively the same place in the sky. What a contrail pattern they painted. I figured it must have been a military maneuver of some kind. "We fly, that's what we do." Nice descriptive answer from the RAF though.
not much use in retrospect, but you might find this website useful for identifying which aircraft are overflying you
ReplyDeletehttp://www.flightradar24.com/
It's a bit late to get in touch, but I've only just stumbled across this post - when you see patterns as uniform as that, you can be fairly sure it is made by an RAF E3 AWACS surveillance plane on an exercise.
ReplyDelete