What A Whopper! Estimating The Weight Of A Chemtrail
A crude calculation that reveals an aluminium oxide ‘chemtrail’ to be very heavy indeed. So heavy, in fact, that the plane couldn’t get airborne in the first instance
A lot of people I know these days are pointing up at the sky and blurting something about chemtrails. Commercial airliners both big and small are squirting out deadly concoctions, apparently. Gone are ye olde contrails of my youth and the fashion de rigueur these days is yer chemtrail, innit though?
“It never looked like this when I was growing up” is a favourite utterance.
Being brought-up on a near-weekly diet of a lucky bag, airfix kit, Dinky toy and some-or-other science magazine from a tender age I tended to go big on planes, from Richthofen’s triple winger to Concorde’s technological innovation. At least a dozen plastic planes hung on threads from my bedroom ceiling. It was going to be the air cadets for me, followed by the RAF; except my ex-navy father had other ideas. And so I continued to build kits, get paint on the kitchen table, swoon at glossy photos of sleek airframes, and take my cheapo binoculars to local airfields. Such was my excitement at seeing something in the air that I’d often forget to take my sandwiches.
Aviation bubbled up again during my PhD when the shared house I joined put me in the rather jolly company of three bright bods who’d all landed jobs with the Civil Aviation Authority. What fabulously fascinating stories they would tell over wine and cheesy comestibles. The oldest bod went on to do very big things in aviation indeed and so, over more wine and nibbles, I got to hear the juicy bits the public are never going to hear. Then came my government career. My drinking buddy during that time was a spiffing RAF chap specialising in radar and air traffic control. Being rather bright and super-dedicated he worked his way up to being the boss man at the former West Drayton air traffic control centre in charge of the skies over Southern England (now LACC). Boy did he have some stories to tell! The interesting thing in all this alcoholic info-haze is that, despite a fair few frank and feisty sizzlers, the nefarious use of airliners to spray stuff about the skies never bubbled to the surface once, even a tiny weeny bit; even after a third bottle of wine.
Facebook Frolics
It wasn’t until I arrived on Facebook in 2010 that the notion of chemtrails floated into my mind space. A few new-found friends insisted they were a thing and posted dozens of scary-looking photos to prove it. “But these are just contrails” was my standard reply; a reply that invariably fell on deaf ears. Whenever I pointed out that water vapour is a by-product of the combustion of hydrocarbons and that this freezes at altitude to form long lasting trails I’d get the standard issue “but it wasn’t like this when we were growing up” line. Totally lost on these folk is the development of engine design from turbojet to high-bypass turbofan and a near-exponential rise in air traffic over that time.
Herewith a rather interesting article that explains how modern high-bypass turbofans generate more water vapour than anything else, this being an engine design that wasn’t used in earnest until the late ‘70s. Stick a load of these in the sky and it certainly won’t look the same as it did 30 years ago. As for how many more to stick up there, here’s world air travel and world air freight statistics for the period 1950 – 2021 in billions of passenger kilometres flown (blue) and billions of cargo kilometres (purple), the source to which may be found here.
That’s quite a rise, isn’t it? Somebody looking skyward in 2015 is going to be witnessing around 6,800 billion km of each type of movement, then comparing this to the 800 billion km of each type of movement they saw back in, say, 1975. If we assume an equal mix of flights then we’re talking about a leap from 1,600 billion flight km to 13,600 billion flight km, representing a factor increase of 8.5 times, and with that rate accelerating. This is why the skies don’t look the same. They can’t possibly look the same with 8.5 times more air traffic, and with engine designs that kick out more water vapour than before!
The good news is that the penny drops for some folk when considering this info but others are seemingly stuck in groupthink where facts don’t matter. It appears that only their belief in unverifiable social media content matters. As a consequence I wondered if there was a plain and simple fact so darn obvious that it would crash into their cult-driven consciousness like a bull in a china shop. That’s when I had an epiphany.
An Epiphany
Nobody asks how heavy a chemtrail gets. They look, they point and they utter, but they don’t bother to figure something as basic as this. ‘Chem’ is going to weigh, and a big trail will weigh a lot, and that weight needs to be lifted into the air by a commercial airliner already laden with passengers, cargo and fuel, there being such a thing as maximum take-off weight (MTOW) for each and every jet.
It struck me that your typical chemtrail might simply be too heavy to be a physical possibility. Some FB ‘friends’ have responded by pointing to reports of private jets doing strange things in the skies and whilst this is certainly plausible for specialist companies like 2Excel and RVL the vast majority of trails that get people jumping up and down are observed coming out of the back of commercial flights at altitude brimming with passengers/cargo/fuel that may be tracked in real time from airport to airport using apps like Flightradar24.com. For some folk anything seen coming out the back of any airliner these days is ‘chem’, and I find this both bizarre and disturbing in that it smacks of programmed paranoia.
Water Is Strange
In this regard it’s worth considering what we should reasonably expect to be coming out of the back end of a commercial airliner that is burning aviation fuel to stay airborne. Water vapour is a major combustion product, and super-heated water vapour (gas) is going to condense into droplets (liquid) at altitude and rapidly freeze (solid). We’re talking big time phase transition and it is a strange property of water that hot stuff will freeze faster than cold under certain conditions! No, I’m not making this up - check out the Mpemba Effect. Commercial airliners flying at altitude are rather excellent ice-making machines.
How Cold Does It Get Up There?
Whilst we’re talking about freezing gaseous water vapour into icy trails at altitude let’s have a look at the official gubbins that is the 1962 US Standard Atmosphere graph so we can figure just how cold it gets outside of the cozy cabin:
With commercial airliners typically cruising at 30,000ft – 40,000ft (9.14 – 12.19km) we can eyeball that red line as it crosses the 10km value and read off what looks to me like 224K, this being -49.15°C (or -56.47°F in old money). Now that is cold!
So cold, in fact, that gaseous water vapour is going to freeze instantly and stay frozen indefinitely unless it can work its way downward. Eyeballing that chart again we discover that frozen water held in a trail doesn’t stand a chance of thawing until it falls to 2 – 3km (6,500 – 9,842ft) so we must expect these trails to linger for quite some while under the right conditions. There is, of course, the process of sublimation that will serve to dissipate trails if conditions dictate, but the bottom line is that a combustion trail could easily last many hours – no ‘chem’ is needed for it to look and act strange. And if you want to know just how strange water and ice can be, check out the work of Gerald Pollack on Youtube or - better still - invest in his fabulous book.
What Would We Expect to See Anyways?
I asked my Facebook chemtrail gang to explain what they’d expect to see in the skies from a consideration of the rapid freezing of combustion products at altitudes that never get anywhere near the melting point for ice, and for an air corridor that is carrying several hundred flights per day. Nobody has bothered to reply. Neither has my Facebook chemtrail gang bothered to answer my question about zero chemtrail days.
Where I live we can observe direct flights from the Americas to Europe and beyond right up overhead at 30,000 - 40,000ft, which puts a strain on my neck when handling binoculars! On some days (there were three such days last week) we noted little or no trails for every single darn flight zipping by regardless of airline, airframe, engine design, originating airport, loading and destination.
Did they all conspire to magically run out of ‘chem’ regardless of a variety of complex factors that would be impossible to logistically arrange? I suspect not. I suspect that atmospheric conditions conspired to reduce trails. On these days high level clouds are also noticeably absent, and all we get is wall-to-wall clear blue sky or a beautiful blue sky dotted with few fluffy cumulus clouds under 6,500ft. On days when altostratus, cirrostratus and cirrus clouds feature we also tend to observe lingering trails. A wee clue, perhaps? When it comes to atmospheric conditions what is sauce for the goose is surely sauce for the gander but chemtrailers don’t seem to be able to cotton-on to the link between trail length and cloud formation; all they seem to see is deadly ‘chem’ raining down on them, which is very eschatological if you ask me.
Aluminium Oxide
Aluminium Oxide (Al2O3) is the most popular ‘chem’ (from what I can gather) and you can read about this here. This substance is abundant within the Earth’s crust and possesses a high refractive index, which means it’s good at bending light, which means it is reflective, being slightly more reflective than water or ice. Hence its proposed use in geoengineering schemes aimed at cooling the planet. Quite why a cool planet is considered a good thing when the biosphere flourishes under warm conditions is beyond comprehension, and I view boffins who propose such measures as dangerous psychos (or in the pay of such).
Aluminium oxide is the best thing to spray up there to block out the sun and endanger the biosphere if you’re into that sort of evil-doing. The drawback is that aluminium oxide is heavy, with a density of 3.987 g/cm3, making it four times the weight of water, blob-for-blob. This will become an issue when I set out to estimate the weight of a hypothesised chemtrail below.
One other factor worthy of note is that aluminium oxide is insoluble in all solvents, which means it ain’t going to dissolve in the atmosphere and disappear whilst floating around up there. The only way it’s going to disappear from view is by floating to the ground or by being washed out of the skies by rain, though it might also disperse and become optically invisible. A covert project to block sunlight will require constant and effective chemtrailing, and this will lead to tell-tale signs of elevated levels of aluminium compounds in rivers, streams, reservoirs, fields, livestock, humans and crops.
But here’s the problem. There are multiple sources of what we may call environmental aluminium, ranging from agricultural practice to industry to pharmaceuticals, to cosmetics, to the food industry and beyond. People will excrete the stuff as well as wizz and sweat it away. Aluminium oxide is commonly found in plastics, sunscreen, blusher, lipstick and nail polish. It can also be found in glass products and is used heavily in refineries for the processing of hydrogen sulphide into sulphur as well as for gas purification. As a woodworker I’m using sandpaper made with aluminium oxide, and it is found in many abrasives including toothpaste. Most dermal abrasion (cosmetic or clinical) relies on aluminium oxide and, of course, it forms the basis of all reflective and metallic paints. Even birth control pills rely on aluminium oxide! All these sources and more need to be accounted for if we are to say anything about the contribution of a covert global airborne project of consequence.
I hope readers get the bigger picture here. We’re drowning in aluminium oxide on a daily basis from all sides, with reliance (and consumption) increasing annually. We are an aluminium oxide dependent society, and so to pin the blame for elevated levels of environmental aluminium squarely on trails sprayed at +30,000ft is as narrow-minded as you can get. Any chemtrailer doing their bit for the biosphere through activism but using toothpaste, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals needs some serious alone time with their own mind.
Enter The Expert
Dr Christopher Exley PhD FRSB is considered to be the world expert on aluminium. At least he was until he started discovering some unsavoury facts about aluminium adjuvants in vaccines and their implication for neurodegenerative diseases, at which point the knives came out. If you haven’t got a copy of his sole book Imagine You Are An Aluminium Atom: Discussions With Mr Aluminium (Skyhorse 2021) then order a copy now and have your worldview turned on its head. On page 44 we find a section pertinent to my article headed ‘The Air We Breathe’. Here it is verbatim:
The Air That We Breathe
The air that we breathe is largely unavoidable exposure to aluminum13. Aluminum is present in the air in myriad different forms, both natural, such as wind-blown dusts from across the globe, and unnatural, such as particulates from the incomplete combustion of fossil and other fuels. In our most polluted cities, we regularly breathe in particulate materials that are anything between a thousandth and a hundredth of a millimeter in size, often abbreviated as PMs with the notation PM10, meaning particulates of around to pm in size. Many PMs are aluminum-based or at least aluminum-rich. Everyday exposure to PMs is implicated in all manner of human disease, from respiratory disorders to neurological disease such as Alzheimer’s disease. While we are a long way from attributing etiology to these correlative relationships, a contributory role for aluminum through exposure to PMs cannot and should not be discounted. The air that we breathe is also contaminated with aluminum residues from aircraft and rocket fuel. Aluminum is a powerful propellant, and without its inclusion in such fuels, it is unlikely that we would have made it out of Earth’s atmosphere and onward and upward to the moon and beyond. Aerosols of aluminum salts are also proposed as tools for engineering climate. Applied as clouds in the upper atmosphere, they might act as coolants by reflecting and/or absorbing heat from the sun. There is a global body of activists believing that this activity, known as “geoengineering,” is actually ongoing as opposed to being a suggestion for future consideration. Personally, I could think of few worse environmental practices than the wholesale contamination of the atmosphere with aluminum salts destined to fall to Earth. I have always taken my lead on environmental issues from independent peer-reviewed scientific literature, and, right now, this does not support the claims of the geoengineering activists. Indeed, we went as far as to use Keele University’s designated meteorological station to collect dry and wet deposition over a period of twelve weeks from October to December 2015 and measure its content of aluminum. In spite of skies that were regularly decorated with what are called chemtrails, possibly contrails (flume from aircraft), and our usual amount of rainfall, we did not measure unusually high content of aluminum in either dry or wet deposition during this period. To investigate further the possibility that geoengineering using aerosols of aluminum salts was being or had been practiced in the United Kingdom, we additionally obtained historical rainfall data for aluminum. This was from the Meteorological Office in the United Kingdom and covered a number of designated sites across the country. Again, there were no unusual or suspicious data to suggest that our atmosphere was or still is being actively contaminated with aluminum.
That is with one exceptional exception. The Summer 2012 readings for Porton Down in southern England were very high, at least ten times higher than the highest value recorded in our experiments at Keele. Whether these unusual data are evidence of an experiment in geoengineering in the United Kingdom, or perhaps over the Atlantic Ocean, is impossible to know. However, it is true that following the publication in 2009 of a report on geoengineering by the Royal Society of London, two of the United Kingdom’s research councils, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), convened a sandpit discussion on the subject. One outcome of this discussion was a project called SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection from Climate Engineer) to investigate the feasibility of using aerosols in climate change mitigation.’14 All information specific to this project has disappeared from the EPSRC website, and just one document, from zoli, remains on the NERC website. The scientists associated with SPICE were acutely aware of the controversial aspects of their work, and such may be behind the apparent closure of the project. Whether this project, and with it geoengineering, continues elsewhere in the United Kingdom (or around the world) is unknown. Until there is incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, I will continue to reserve judgement on its contribution to human exposure to aluminum. I very much hope that I am right!
[13] Christopher Exley, “Human exposure to aluminium,” Environmental Science: Processes & Impacts, https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2013/EM/C3EM00374D#!divAbstract
[14] “The SPICE Project,” accessed September 30, 2020, http://www.spice.ac.uk/
That’s an honest statement for sure, and it doesn’t exactly put me at ease, but there’s one more more very practical thing we ought to consider and that is the weight of an aluminium oxide chemtrail. We shall start with a diagram:
Consider A Pink Person…
Consider a pink person standing in a farmer’s field. They have an uninterrupted view of the sky save for trees that mask the horizon in all directions, the net effect being to limit the lowest possible viewing angle to 10°. They watch a chemtrail get squirted from horizon to horizon by an intercontinental flight travelling at 35,000ft. Using a modicum of trigonometry we can calculate that the length of trail they can see stretches 65.3 nautical miles (120.9km).
This might sound like an awful lot but anyone with a smart phone running the Flightradar24.com app can verify these figures in a muddy field for themselves. I recall leaning out of my bedroom window to watch a gleaming KLM flight scorching a path from New York to Amsterdam and was gobsmacked at the distance covered in such a short space of time, with the sparkling jet still visible in the early morning light but flying over a town some 75km distant. The trigonometry of the skies is most deceptive!
Now that we have a length we ought to consider a width and I shall take 30 metres, being a typical(ish) wingspan, and I shall take a stab at 10 metres for the depth of the trail. Such a trail, at 121km long, encloses 36,300,000 cubic metres of air space - but how much does this weigh?
Well, I’m going to start by assuming the chemtrail is nothing more than a vapour trail i.e. it is a very long and thin cloud. According to Sciencealert.com a typical cumulus cloud is not that dense at just 0.5g of water per cubic metre, which means our trail of 36,300,000 cubic metres is going to weigh a mere 18,150kg if it were water droplets at this level of optical density.
Since we know that aluminium oxide is almost exactly four times the density of water then we can factor that figure up to 72,364kg for a 121km trail of the stuff sprayed to the same optical density as a cumulus cloud1. Now that is really heavy and just to give some frank perspective on this the Maximum Take-Off Weight (MTOW) of a Boeing 737-200 series is rated at 58,100kg with the Operating Empty Weight (OEW) rated at 29,600kg. This means this popular airframe can only lift 28,500kg and this has to be shared amongst fuel, passengers, cargo and ‘chem’.
It should be abundantly clear from this that whatever can be seen coming out the back of a 737-200 at 35,000ft for a distance of 121km cannot possible be pure aluminium oxide or anywhere near it, for we are falling short by 43,864kg! Let us then suppose a stash of the stuff has been hidden in the cargo bay and that to avoid suspicion this is limited to 20% of the maximum possible airlift weight of 28,500kg; that is to say our fix of ‘chem’ is stuck down at 5,700kg.
At a density of 3.987 g/cm3 this would take up just 1.43m3 and therefore be easily hidden. If the captain then flipped the cockpit chem switch to ‘ON’ we can determine that 5,700kg of aluminium oxide being sprayed to the same optical density as that of cloud for a trail that is 30m wide and 10m deep would fizzle out at 9.53Km. That’s not very far and it would look like a small splutter up in the sky, being just 8% of what our pink person is able to view from horizon to horizon in that muddy field.
All things being equal this would mean aluminium oxide needs to be sprayed out the back at a rate that is just 8% of what would be needed to make a cloud visible. Would aluminium oxide be optically visible (and thus effective) at such a thin smear? I doubt it very much and so, like Bilbo Baggins, we’d be in danger of spreading too little butter on too much bread.
Note that this vain attempt at smearing ‘chem’ to 8% is for a mere 121km of visible trail. How about a trail that stretches hundreds and thousands of kilometres that remains optically dense for its duration? This point is made quite clear in this sobering YouTube clip. I recall seeing a satellite photo of a massive trail likely produced by the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird strategic reconnaissance plane a few years back that stretched all the way from California to somewhere over Central Asia; a distance exceeding 10,000 nautical miles (18,520km). That was all ‘chem’ was it? If I can find the photo I’ll update the article so folk can squint and think for themselves.
In The ‘Know’
For those not in the know use of ‘chem’ for geoengineering is now old hat. Check out these fascinating developments at Reading University - they’re just the start of a whole big bunch of scary new science! And please do remember that this is the public domain stuff we’re allowed to know about. My personal experience as a ‘govsuit’ is that cutting-edge projects funded by the military industrial complex are 20 - 30 years ahead of what the public get to witness as so-called ‘cutting edge’.
And there’s more… all that space junk burning up on re-entry? Well, the metallic dust it is creating could be messing with the ionosphere also. Check this article out. This is the stuff we know about; I can’t even begin to imagine what we don’t know about.
And there’s more… the EU is getting cranky about contrails and their particulates. And so they should. With air traffic rising exponentially contrails are already altering the weather but only a few studies have been made. And yes, unpleasant stuff like nitrogen oxides and sulphur and comes out the back of planes as well as water and carbon dioxide - and don’t forget that the primary greenhouse gas is water by a big, big margin. This could become a political hot potato and, IMHO, the insistence of chemtrailers on chem, chem, chem isn’t going to help one bit: those vapour trails are already a problem without getting dramatic or parroting unverified hearsay (and deliberate disinformation) that might dilute any decent eco-arguments made.
Then there’s the decline of Earth’s magnetic field to consider. If this continues we’re going to be looking at some wacko phenomena, and I don’t just mean pretty coloured lights. Ionised skies resulting from field collapse means more cloud, more rain and… more contrails (among other things)! This makes me wonder… are chemtrails a psyop designed to mask what is actually going on?
Anyways up and anyways out I’m hoping that folk are beginning to see that carrying sufficient ‘chem’ to achieve lengthy chemtrails – especially with something as heavy as aluminium oxide - is physically impossible, and that the ‘chem’ for intercontinental-sized trails can only come from combustion of the fuel payload. As for geoengineering proper this is a different matter entirely but that’s not what you’re looking at if you look out of the window on this fine morning and see KLM flight KL775 laying a trail from Amsterdam to Quito at a barometric altitude of 32,000ft and 478kts (ground speed).
Kettle On!
Further reading:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_modification
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/solar-geoengineering-using-solid-aerosol-stratosphere
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/15/11835/2015/acp-15-11835-2015.pdf
https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1150/rr-1
This is going to be far more dense than the dispersal density proposed for solar radiation managment (SRM) i.e. we need to see the trail as a puffy thing with our eyes rather than have an invisible nano layer alter the radiation budget. SRM density and optical density are two different things.
Brilliant, I will be sharing this widely!
Now do Flat Earth please!!
Still reading. Thanks. Minor check in order as the Al2O3 density appears 1000x lighter. Check if units s/b g/cm3. I understand water to be 0.9982 g/cm3. Though last time I asked water her weight, she demurred, as a lady would.