Bizarre question of the day: Jet trails

[Robert Hughes]

Montgomery County, Maryland - between Baltimore and Washington DC. It's a major high altitude thoroughfare for all East Coast commercial flights. The Washington DC flight restrictions create a bottleneck so that commercial flights have to make a wide turn. On a clear day I can see 4 planes every 5 minutes, with perhaps a dozen parallel and cross-hatched contrails.

PS these are not the black helicopters - they prefer to fly at about 500 feet over my house. What a racket!

[walter23]

Hi guys, wierd question of the day: I'm looking for a place I can go and photograph lots of jets flying over at high altitude with jet trails. I'm doing a new photo project that will require a few hundred shots of jets and jet trails, all taken on a sunny day. I'd like to go somewhere for the shortest possible time and get the largest possible number of jets with trails. Maybe Las Vegas, or Los Angeles? Denver? Is there anyone here who lives in one of these places who can confirm whether lots of jets fly over there at high altitude? Any other suggestions reasonably close to Seattle?

~cj

Just google "chemtrails" and you'll probaby find loads of nutcases willing to help you out, or reports on the density of "chemtrails", etc.

[kmgibbs]

www.flightaware.com and www.flytecomm.com are two websites that will allow you to track any commercial flight in the U.S.

As said earlier though, contrails are going to depend on temp. and humidity at altitude. Typically the planes are between 30k and 40k feet altitudes enroute. With a little research you could figure out the most congested routes.

[Aaron van de Sande]

I dunno, the contrails in NM fade pretty fast. In NJ they seemed to last forever, especially in the summer. I don't know if the humidity has anything to do with it.

[GPS]

Not humidity but the temperature of the air in that altitude. Warm air - short duration, cold air - longer duration. You can make a weather forecast on this - the longer and more durable the contrail is, the more possibility of a change for colder weather there is. (simply because the cold air will be installed).

[QT Luong]

For those interested in the result, Chris has now posted the image on his web site.
Chris, if you are still here, I am really curious about how you produced the image !

[Kirk Gittings]

Notice how his site is now subtitled "Chris Jordan: Photographic Arts" rather than Chris Jordan Photography as it used to be. This reflects, I assume, his current approach to image making, which is based in photography but highly constructed.

[Salty]

I'm about 20 miles ("as the crow flies") from LA International, but I see the vapor trails at high altitude all the time. I can only assume that the jets are going to Washington State, Hawaii, etc.

The down side is that on cloudy evenings some of the airliners make their approaches low enough that the engine noise actually vibrates the windows. Since the AeroMexico airliner crashed a mile from here 20 years ago, I spend a lot of time watching the airliners overhead.

[GPS]

When I was living in NY, about 15 miles from J.F. Kennedy airport (a few steps from the place the plane with Dominicans crashed later), the planes were flying just overheads although each time they did, they were fined for it. While I didn't like the noise I appreciated it when once leaving for a trip to Malaysia - from the plane's window, about 600m in the air, I was flying right over my car parked in the driveway of my house... That was the closest I got to my house in an airplane!

[Sal Santamaura]

For those interested in the result, Chris has now posted the image on his web site.
Chris, if you are still here, I am really curious about how you produced the image !

The last 10 minutes 30 seconds of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS this week (the one mostly about Rachel Carson) was a feature on Chris and his work, including the Jet Trails image. Here's a link to the show's site:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html