After clear blue cloudless (and contrail-less) skies yesterday morning, conditions gradually got better for contrail formation through the afternoon, ahead of a band of rain this morning. There was quite a narrow, and relatively low, "window" for persistent contrails, and I caught this one from when it formed to when it drifted out of sight more than half an hour later:
This is the plane responsible, a Martinair MD-11 flying from Amsterdam to Miami (flight MP1161) at 30,000 feet:
The rapidly dissipating trail it is crossing is from a Cargolux 747 (flight CV661 fro Houston to Luxembourg), flying at 39,000ft, just out of shot. Here's a FlightRadar screen grab of the crossing point:
While the trail at 39,000ft quickly dispersed, the one at 30,000ft persisted as it was blown south by the wind
3:05pm, two minutes after the first photo above:
3:12pm - note the two higher planes which are only leaving very short contrails. On the left, BA7031, Glasgow-Toulouse, at 35000ft, and on the right, EI345, Zurich-Dublin, at 38,000ft:
3:22pm:
By 3:31pm, it had drifted a long way to the south. The fresh trail crossing it here was ZB458 (Birmingham - Lanzarote) which was still climbing, and reached 30,000ft about three minutes before this photo was taken: you can see where the trail fades in just before it crosses the old trail. If the cloud wasn't hiding it, you'd probably see it fading out again as the plane continued to climb:
I've just got hold of a digital SLR so hopefully I'll be able to get some better shots than this old 5mp Lumix soon!