posted 07-20-2001 02:55 PM            

And although I will certainly acknowledge the criticism that the observations where not made for every single aircraft in the country during the data collection period, it is a decent sampling, and it took a hell of a lot of work and it is the only documented Flight Explorer research of any magnitude.

So, it certainly appeared that military flights (implied by non-appearance on FE) were the only flights that produced trails that lasted for several hours. This even was acknowledged by a non-believer, the honorable Mr. Duncan Kunz, who stated that there was a "sigma 5" correlation and that something had to causing this correlation.

I'd like to point out that when I did observe unidentified craft leaving these highly persistent trails, that the trails were never from horizon to horizon, but always in the form of relatively short strips. (I know these "short" strips are miles long, that's not the point.) Also, when I observed identified planes leaving long trails they were often horizon to horizon, although sometimes patchy.

This indicates two unique characteristics of the trails from unidentified jets, extra persistence (which, by itself could be indicative of unique fuel or engine properties) as well as their "short strip" nature.

posted 07-20-2001 03:25 PM            

The fact that the air pockets causing the strips survive for a long time, probably indicates they are significantly different than the air masses surrounding them.

Remember, a B-52 has 2 engines per mount. Should make more persistent contrails than a jet with only one engine to produce each contrail.

Military heavy lift craft may be using higher throttle settings than a civilian airliner would need to. Are military jet engines held to the same efficiency and noise standards that commercial engines are?
Some research here may help.

Pehaps Peter Cordiani was up there dumping Soil-Moist gel. I knew I'd heard of that idea before.

posted 07-21-2001 01:44 PM            

It seems as if you are willing to acknowledge that there is some differentiating factor that causes military flights to produce trails longer than commercial/passenger do. That is certainly what I've seen, over and over and over again.

But what I'm trying to convey is that these strips from the unidentified (military) planes behave differently than strips from identified planes. For example, I have never seen a strip from an indentified plane remain for hours, instead there is a tendency to sublimate and disappear quickly. On the other hand strips from unidentified planes will appear on days when the regular traffic isn't leaving them at all. Also, these same strips have a tendency to persist and spread. Even though they start with very blunt edges, after a couple of hours, they have spread and feathered out. (The photo below from Rense is a good example.) If you start with an initial hypothesis that this is caused by air pockets and subsequent feathering is result of the mixing of the surrounding air, it seems as though this mixing would have already blended the supposed pockets thus eliminating the possibility of having very blunt initial edges in the first place.

Even the longest real contails I ever saw and verified using Flight Explorer never had these attributes which seem to be the exclusive domain of the trail strips from unidentified flights, on the other hand besides the trail strips the unidentified traffic also produced contrails that were very consistent with the contrails from identified traffic. So it really looks like there is a common factor between the identified and the unidentified flights they both have consistent contrails in a given time period, but the unidentified flights may have the additional highly persistent trail segment that exhibits several factors that differentiate it from the contrails:

1. Tendency to persist
2. Never horizon to horizon (as contrails are sometimes), but relatively short.
3. Bluntness of start and stop

Interestingly these factors are consistent with what I would expect to be the behavior of a released liquid material. If there was a controlled sprayed material being released it would most likely have blunt edges and would contain so much more additional moisture than a contrail by itself that it would definately have a much longer duration than a contrail.