Question on "smoking" aircrafts

Originally posted by Xar Ke Zeth
If you're talking about the Tomcat, it sure can. contrails and condensation things when going supersonic are literally, in common terms, clouds. The reason why they don't last long is because they're below the natural cloud cover, where they don't naturally form.

Those other pics are definitely from smoke canisters. What they use, I'm not sure, as it would most likely vary from country to country. Google might help.

I am not disputing that as a fact I am disputing the photo. It just looks to me as if the cloud is artificial and looks like they have tried to make it artificially imperfect.....just an opinion anyway

Originally posted by Infidellic

Originally posted by Xar Ke Zeth
If you're talking about the Tomcat, it sure can. contrails and condensation things when going supersonic are literally, in common terms, clouds. The reason why they don't last long is because they're below the natural cloud cover, where they don't naturally form.

Those other pics are definitely from smoke canisters. What they use, I'm not sure, as it would most likely vary from country to country. Google might help.

I am not disputing that as a fact I am disputing the photo. It just looks to me as if the cloud is artificial and looks like they have tried to make it artificially imperfect.....just an opinion anyway

Looks sort of like a cumulonimbus thing. It does look sort of fake, I'd've probably thought that before I knew about planes and the like.

As colsislander said the additive used to produce "smoke" on display aircraft, including helicopters is diesel. Plain diesel for white or when a colour is required they add a dye.

I don't know about the rest of them but the smoke effect in the picture of the F-14 is caused by the aircraft dumping fuel. The same effect can be seen in the movie Top Gun and you can see it coming out of the dump tube located between the engines.

when you see an airliner at cruise altitude , depending on the local (for the aircraft) pressure/temp/humidity , it can leave contrails - which is when the hot air from the engine exhaust mixes with the colder environmental air of low vapor pressure and low temperature.


same principle for low level - hot aircraft structure interacting with colder environmental air.

breathe out on a cold day - what you get is vapor , hot air from you interacting with cold air outside.

The other pics are smoke generators - which is as been said , diesel (or other oil) mixing with the hot exhaust and a colored dye being injected if you want anything other than white!

Alot of the pictures are just smoke generating devices for air shows..you can tell because long contrails only happen at high altitudes not down here it surfacelevels.
The other pictures are of condensation forming on the wing surfaces...airfoil effects of literally seperating the moisture out of the air due to vacum effect. Its really cool to see. The performance envelopes of many aircraft today are such that this happens often in maneuvers. It is literally seperating the moisture out of what would appear normally to be dry clear air. Pressure drop across a surface..and wo la.....cool...!!! I love to see those pictures. Also the ones breaking the sound barrier. Orangetom

Here's a pic of a : Mig-29's gas canister. The image is large but does not require resizing.

www.acig.org...

Edit: Image/photo was oversized. Changed to a direct link.


[edit on 11-6-2005 by Seekerof]

A "smoking" super hornet :

The Luftwaffe rulz

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