Tag Archives: planes

United plans to boost its in-flight entertainment options with free satellite Wi-Fi service from SpaceX’s Starlink. In an announcement, the airline said its fleet of mainline and regional aircraft, more than 1,000 planes, will receive the Wi-Fi service starting sometime next year after it begins testing in early 2025.

The company said it will deliver comparable Wi-Fi to what customers get on the ground, even at 35,000 feet, to enable services including TV streaming, gaming and social media on seatback screens as well as personal devices for fliers. The rollout will happen over several years and will make in-flight internet accessible in places “previously unreachable by traditional cell or Wi-Fi signals” such as oceans and polar regions, United said in its release. 

The service, United…

An image being widely shared on Facebook claims to show how to identify a “chemtrail” as compared to a “contrail” left in the sky by an aeroplane.

The post, one example of which has been shared more than 6,300 times, includes side-by-side images of two planes in the sky with differing lengths of white trails behind them.

Text within the photo identifies the longer trail as a “chemtrail”, adding the “trail extends for miles” and “lasts for hours”. While a “contrail” in the image is described as where the “trail extends for feet lasts for seconds”.

But both of the images show contrails, or condensation trails, left by aircraft.

We’ve written a number of times about conspiracy theories around ‘chemtrails’, which claim that white lines in…

A video of white plumes coming from the tip of a plane’s wings has been shared on Facebook with the caption “Chemtrails come from engines right?”

The post has over 700 shares on Facebook and 8,000 likes on Instagram.

It’s not completely clear exactly what the caption means. It may be referring to the fact that so-called ‘chemtrails’ (the conspiracy theory that the white lines emitted from planes are actually chemicals being purposefully sprayed to harm people) are actually usually contrails. 

Contrails appear when water vapour, either already in the air around the engine or emitted from it, condenses around soot particles emitted from the combustion process due to cold temperatures at high altitude. This forms long thin lines of cloud. They can look…

A post on Instagram with more than 2,000 likes shows a flight-tracking map of part of the UK covered in short, parallel flight paths.

Text overlaid onto the image says “CONTRAILS OR CH3MTRAILS?”, while part of the caption says “UK 2023 Flight Patterns”. 

The post (which has also been shared on Facebook) appears to suggest that the unusual-looking routes shared on the map are linked to so-called ‘chemtrails’, a conspiracy theory which claims that the white lines seen behind planes are actually chemicals being deliberately sprayed into the atmosphere.

These white lines in the sky are actually contrails—water vapour produced by aeroplane engines freezes at high altitude, forming long thin lines of cloud.

In reality the flight paths shown on the