Wednesday 30 January 2008

Crowded skies over Europe

I like to fly to the UK in a south-facing window seat (during daylight hours). At 30,000 ft, above the clouds, the view is quite sublime. Flying out on Monday morning, northern Europe under ten/tenths cloud cover, the view from the plane is akin to looking out over Arctic snowfields. The skies are getting crowded. The horizon is busy with air traffic. Above: A WizzAir Airbus A320 heading for Warsaw passes us going the other way. Below: An eastbound Boeing 737 passes (at a somewhat more comfortable distance). But what's that other aircraft crossing its path?

Below: A sequence of maximally blown-up enlargements of the mystery aircraft that climbed rapidly from under our flight path and above the Boeing's one. The order in which they were taken was top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right. My guess is that the plane is either a Eurofighter Typhoon or a Dassault Rafale. The third picture (a blow-up of the photo above) shows the plane dramatically altering its angle of attack, a manoeuvre that a civil jetliner would be unable to perform.

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