Day 10 - Empty Skies

I sort of heeded my own advice of yesterday, skipping the first dozen pages of the Sunday Times in the hope of finding something less depressing to read, and retiring to the garden.  I began the process of rendering the vegetable patch to a fine tilth ready for planting, hoed a flower bed and planted broccoli and antirrhinum in the greenhouse.  Relaxing in bright sunshine I scanned the area from which yesterdays Kites had appeared but could see nothing against the gin-clear blue sky. This is highly unusual because Mushroom Cottage is situated on the hypotenuse of what used to be called Amber One and Blue One Airways and today funnel the North to South and East to West air traffic across the UK.  Normally, on a day like today, the blue sky would be crisscrossed by dozens white vapour trails but today there are none – civil aviation appears to be pretty much grounded.

Condensation trails or contrails are a feature of high flying aircraft where warm air and particles from the engines mixing with the very cold and dry ambient air produces streams of ice crystal cloud.  They are a dead give away if you are a bomber on the way to a target.  Indeed, on the advice of the meteorological officer, you might have even planned to fly at altitudes where the formation of contrail was unlikely.  If you were an air-to-air refuelling tanker or another aircraft hoping to meet one, contrails could be a godsend.  Before air-to-air refuelling can begin the tanker and receiver must join up in visual contact.  At its simplest, a fighter aircraft could be directed by the ground controlled radar or two aircraft approaching each other from opposite directions could find each other and hook up using their own navigation aids, air-to-air ranging, radio direction finding and their own airborne radars.  There was nothing more satisfying than hurtling towards each other at a closing speed of about 800 knots, slightly offset, one aircraft turning at precisely the right differential range and the tanker aircraft rolling out a couple of miles ahead of the receiver - the receiver seeing, invitingly, the hose trailed ready to dispense fuel.  If the tanker was contrailing the join up was greatly simplified but if the tanker could not be seen against the blank brightness of a featureless sky, there was one more trick up the sleeve – the tanker could mark its presence by jettisoning a small amount of fuel which would immediately vaporise and form an unmistakable white line in the sky.  In its early days, the Victor K Mk 2 tanker could jettison fuel from 5 sources – here is an example of a Victor announcing its presence in a featureless sky:

Fuel could be released from each of two refuelling pods on the outer wings, both underwing fuel tanks and a tail cone jettison pipe.

Happy days, not one of which ever felt remotely like working!