Marin B
Active Member
I haven't had a chance to spend much time on this site yet, and so perhaps the answer is already here somewhere... By way of background, I live/work in the San Francisco Bay area where there are several busy airports. Also, having recently purchased the FlightRadar24 app, I've learned that several Hawaiian bound flights from the East & Midwest fly over S.F., as well as LAX-bound flights from Asia, Seattle, and Anchorage. So typically when there are contrails, there are a lot that often result in the milky white skies that a family member would like to convince me to believe is the result of government spraying.
Yesterday where I work the skies were completely blue, with the exception of a single contrail from a large jet - maybe a 747, flying very high (amateur guess is close to 40,000 ft.) in what I think was a NW to SE direction. I got out my flight tracker app, but the jet didn't show up at all. It formed the only persistent contrail I saw during the 1-2 hour time span that I was periodically looking out my office window. In fact, I didn't see any other contrails at all. Whereas this one contrail was thick and spread out to form a big band across the sky. So my question is what can explain that? Is it possible to have only a very narrow altitude range that results in persistent contrail formation?
Yesterday where I work the skies were completely blue, with the exception of a single contrail from a large jet - maybe a 747, flying very high (amateur guess is close to 40,000 ft.) in what I think was a NW to SE direction. I got out my flight tracker app, but the jet didn't show up at all. It formed the only persistent contrail I saw during the 1-2 hour time span that I was periodically looking out my office window. In fact, I didn't see any other contrails at all. Whereas this one contrail was thick and spread out to form a big band across the sky. So my question is what can explain that? Is it possible to have only a very narrow altitude range that results in persistent contrail formation?