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Yes, you can't manufacture rain clouds. But planes do of course "manufacture" cirrus clouds, which is what contrails are. But cirrus clouds don't make rain.

I have photos of a very similar trail (maybe even the same one?) taken on the same evening, April 21, from central London. They are on my phone, I will edit to add them in to this post... Edit: here they are. One to give wider context. Taken at exactly 20:00 BST (19:00Z) Close-up, with moon...

Just a note to say that when time permits I am planning to count the visible contrails in each three-hour period and plot them against the average humidity for that period. Obviously this will only be possible for periods when the sky is mostly free of low cloud. Continuing for now with posting...

"Scuffles"... not exactly Ferguson, is it? (FWIW I work in central London and haven't seen any protest stronger than mild eye-rolling at the prospect of another five years of Dave.)

See also the regular use of a (real, but totally unrelated) BBC News screenshot with the caption "BREAKING NEWS" on Facebook to promote "global marches" etc: Presumably the idea is to lend legitimacy to the story underneath, despite the fact that there is no link at all between the screenshot...

May 7: Mostly cloudy morning; no contrails seen in the gaps in the morning. Clouds break up a bit around 13:45 (12:45Z, 1:02 in video) with lots of cirrus and contrails becoming evident. Several very persistent contrails including one prominent curved trail entering from the left of the...

May 6. This thread probably isn't doing much for the Manchester tourist board! Quite clear early morning with no contrails, then rapidly clouding up and full overcast by 07:30 (06:00) Overcast with rain showers, brief clearance about 16:30 (15:30Z) then cloud returns. Cloud begins to break...

May 5: Overcast morning, sudden clearance just before 13:00 (12:00Z) Variable amounts of shower clouds in the afternoon with deep blue clear sky in between. No contrails. Humidity about 90% at 06:00Z but rapidly decreasing to around 10-20% by 12:00Z and staying below 20% until the end...

An interesting sunset tonight. I'm not sure if that banded cirrus started life as a contrail or not.

Nicely done. I initially thought it might have been UAL900 but that was only from eyeballing FR24 rather than doing any fancy analysis.

If I saw a contrail describing a full circle or even a U-turn, I would take a photo of it. This was an hour or so ago, and quite a sharp bend, relatively speaking. Worthy of a photo.

Those double dogleg trails are a good match for routes into SFO. For instance:

If it's the plane I think it is, then the time of the photo was probably rather earlier than 11.35. @Igrokush1 can you use an EXIF viewer to get the exact time? In any case I really don't see anything out of the ordinary here. This was my sky this morning and there are almost as many trails...

Was the plane leaving the trail heading towards or away from you in the first picture?

If you mean the one in your original post, again I don't see any evidence for that. I see a straight line, then a curve, then another straight line until the contrail goes out of sight.

I don't see any evidence for that in your photo. I see a small course correction.

Once again I really do recommend the FlightRadar24 app if you have a smartphone. Takes all the guesswork out of identifying those planes! This was yesterday evening. Lots of trails spreading out into cirrus. Normal commercial flights.

I have the charts and videos ready to post. Got a bit of real work to do outside while the sun is shining, but will update later today. Shame I didn't do it in April: there's quite a lot of cloud this month.

An almost perfect 90-degree grid this morning, thanks to a quite strong upper-level wind from the southwest.

Last night in Hampshire. A hint of a halo above the sun in the first one, and a nice shadow and an interesting S-bend on the distant end of the trail heading straight towards me in the second shot.