Some say yes, some say no. It's an authentic photo, at any rate — and a famous one, at that — taken by U.S. Navy Ensign John Gay over the Pacific Ocean in 1999. What you see is the formation of a condensation cloud around an F/A-18 Hornet jet fighter flying at or near the speed of sound. The specifics are up for debate. Read more...Some say yes, some say no. It's an authentic photo, at any rate — and a famous one, at that — taken by U.S. Navy Ensign John Gay over the Pacific Ocean in 1999. What you see is the formation of a condensation cloud around an F/A-18 Hornet jet fighter flying at or near the speed of sound. The specifics are up for debate. Read more...Explore Urban Legends
Comments
Wow, that’s cool. Better if you can show us a video of that!
I never know a cloud can form like that?!
http://www.strangecosmos.com has pictures of large bombers, which are not capable surpassing the sound barrier, and still they can have similar formation of moisture surroundind their hull.
See f.ex. http://www.strangecosmos.com/content/item/115989.html
No, that is just water vapour turning to liquid water drops as a fast airplane passes through moisture rich air. The air flows so fast over the wing that this happens fairly regularly to navy jets. There is a video of an F14 doing this on a flyby of a carrier with VIP’s watching. Some guys were hawking it as a UFO video.
What Jimmy said is exactly right. There are two theories as to why this cloud forms and the one he stated is the most commonly accepted. Some say the cloud is a result of the aircraft “passing through” the sound barrier or that the cloud forms at the same time a sonic boom is heard so we are actually *seeing* a sonic boom. This is false though, and don’t always occur at the *exact* moment an aircraft passes through the sound barrier. However these clouds can occur, with the conditions Jimmy suggested, at SUBsonic speeds(speeds slower than the speed of sound). The clouds form at the lowest point of pressure(around the wings and cockpit).
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