Wednesday - November 10, 2010

Shoulda Known

Looks like that “mystery missile” the other day was actually USAirways flight 808 inbound from Hawaii.

Yep, that fits.

Link here, with the math. Link here, to the source with the nice multi-part graphic at the bottom.

Nice work Liam Bahneman, doing some actual investigative journalism, checking the flight itineraries, and looking up a Newport Beach webcam the day after to see that the same flight the very next day made almost the same kind of contrails in the sky.

Now, I wonder how many days it will be until the TV news folks catch up to this, and stop pushing the sensationalist story now that it’s been figured out. If you are directly under the flight path of a very high altitude jet flying over you through dirty air, the contrails in the sky look just like those of a rocket heading straight up.

And I sure do wish that there was an actual video of an actual missile or space rocket launch, at sundown, photographed from just over the horizon. How are we supposed to tell them apart? Especially since no rule says a shorter range missile has to be supersonic, which means you can’t use your ears to tell impending doom from just another jet going over. I followed the math at the first link, and I still can’t tell the difference; a multi-stage missile could drop it’s booster stage before it cleared the visual horizon. So when an object is too high to see or hear but is creating a visible contrail, how can you tell up from over since they both appear the same? The only way I can figure is to jump in your car, drive several miles, then look again. Assuming that it wasn’t an inbound missile and that you haven’t become a monatomic smithereen ( which would answer the question! ), when you look at the same contrail from the new location it will now have a definite “going over” aspect if it’s from a jet. I’m guessing here, purely guessing, but if it’s a missile launch you’re seeing, it will still look like “up” even from “over there”.

The Newark to Chicago flight passes almost overhead here. So do the New York and Boston to points southwest flights. On a clear day I can count the number of engines and see the airplane itself. The contrails never roil together, nor is there any kind of “plume of fire” behind the jets. But they always look like planes flying overhead, not rockets shooting up. On a cloudy day I can’t see anything anyway, so who cares? We don’t have LA’s level of air pollution, and we don’t have coastal wind and cloud patterns. And we don’t have a distant horizon for the sun to set into. Those factors could make all the difference.

Posted by Drew458     on 11/10/2010 at 02:01 PM   
Filed Under: • Amazing Science and Discoveries • News-Briefs • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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