Off topic doesn't even begin to describe this thread. But I guess that it is both sobering and instructive to be reminded, every so often, that there are people who really think like this.
Geoengineering...
- Thread starter K Henry
- Start date
N017RW
Premium Pilot
It seems K Henry hasn't been around for a few days but maybe he'd be interested in the article below. You see, he sort of asked a question which I added emphasis to in his quote above to point it out.
How Long do Contrails Last? - Contrail Science
Ahhh science!
If he'd only inquire.
Science? Who needs science when conjecture is so much easier?
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Here is a good story about clouds. Sort of on topic but its not a conspiracy its a true story about clouds, kind of.... 
Rankin was on a 70-minute routine navigational flight from the South Weymouth Naval Air Station in Massachusetts to his squadron’s headquarters in Beaufort, North Carolina. Before take-off, he’d had a word with the meteorologist at the air base, who’d told him to expect isolated thunderstorms en route. The thunderclouds could be expected to reach altitudes of 30,000 to 40,000ft. For a decorated Second World War and Korean War vet like Rankin, this was fairly routine stuff. He knew his jet could reach 50,000ft comfortably and so he was confident of being able to fly over any storms without difficulty. That, of course, was assuming the engine wouldn’t conk out just as he was above one.
Forty minutes into the flight, as he was approaching Norfolk, Virginia, Rankin spotted the distinctive shape of a Cumulonimbus ahead. A storm was raging in the town below and the cloud rose in an enormous tower of puffy convection mounds, mushrooming out into a broad, wispy canopy at its top. The summit was at around 45,000ft – somewhat higher than he’d been led to expect by the official back at South Weymouth – so the pilot began a climb to 48,000ft to be sure of clearing it.
Rankin was directly over the top, at an altitude of 47,000ft and a speed of mach 0.82, when he heard a loud bump and rumble from the engine behind him. He watched in disbelief as the rpm indicator on his dashboard spiralled to zero in a matter of seconds and the bright red ‘FIRE’ light began flashing urgently.
Sudden and unexplained engine seizure like this is a one-in-a-million kind of emergency and Rankin knew that he would have to act fast. Without power, the jet’s controls became ineffective and he instinctively reached for the lever that deployed the auxiliary power package to restore emergency electricity. As he pulled the lever, however, he was horrified to feel it come away in his hands. This sounds like a moment worthy of Buster Keaton, but Rankin was finding it anything but funny. He was wearing just a lightweight summer flying suit. It was unheard-of to eject at this altitude at the best of times. To do so without a pressure suit would surely be suicide.
‘The temperature outside was close to –58˚F,’ Rankin later recounted. ‘Perhaps I would survive frostbite without permanent injury, but what about “explosive” decompression at almost ten miles up? And what about that thunderstorm directly below me? If it could be hazardous for an airplane in flight, what would it do to a mere human?’1
There was little time to ponder the dangers. In a matter of seconds, Rankin realised he had no option but to reach behind his head and yank with all his might on the ejection seat handles. At almost exactly 6pm, he exploded out of the cockpit and began his descent toward the cloud below.
‘AT FIRST THERE WAS no sensation of falling, only of zooming through the air,’ said William Rankin of the moments after he ejected from his stricken jet. Within seconds, he was suffering from the effects of the inhospitable environment at 47,000ft.
‘I felt as though I were a chunk of beef being tossed into a cavernous deep freeze,’ he remembered. ‘Almost instantly all exposed parts of my body – around the face, neck, wrists, hands and ankles – began to sting from the cold.’ Even more uncomfortable was the decompression caused by the low pressure at the top of the troposphere as he began the free fall until his parachute would automatically open. He was bleeding from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth as a result of the expansion of his insides, and his body became distended. ‘Once I caught a horrified glimpse of my stomach, swollen as though I were in well-advanced pregnancy. I had never known such savage pain.’ The one benefit of the extreme cold was that it began to numb his body.
In spite of the spinning, flailing nature of his free fall, Rankin managed to secure the emergency oxygen supply to his mouth. It was essential to remain conscious if he was to have any chance of surviving the descent. He was within the upper reaches of the storm cloud, with deteriorating visibility, when he saw on his watch that five minutes had passed since he had ejected. He should have passed the 10,000ft point by now – the height at which the barometric trigger in his parachute would cause it automatically to open. But there was no sign of the parachute. The poor pilot had already suffered an engine failure at 47,000ft, the jet’s auxiliary power lever coming off in his hand and having to eject directly over an enormous storm. Now it was beginning to look like he was hurtling through the air strapped to a parachute that didn’t work.
Deep within the ice-particle upper region of the Cumulonimbus it was dark with zero visibility. This made Rankin totally disorientated, with no idea of his altitude. For all he knew, without his parachute opening he might hit the ground at any moment. It was therefore with great relief that he felt the violent jolt as his parachute finally deployed.
The tension in the risers was enough to reassure him that it had fully opened. He was also relieved to find that, though his emergency oxygen supply had run out, the air at this level was now dense enough for him to be able to breathe without it. In the gloom of the enormous cloud, things appeared tobe looking up: ‘Under the circumstances, overjoyed to be alive and going down safely, consciously, even the increasing turbulence of the air meant nothing. It was all over now, I thought, the ordeal had ended.’ But the turbulence he was beginning to feel and the freezing hailstones starting to strike him meant that he was only now reaching the heart of the storm.
Ten minutes into his descent, Rankin should have been reaching the ground, but the enormous draughts of air that surged up the core of the cloud were retarding his fall. Soon the turbulence became much more severe. He had no visual point of reference in the gloomy depths but he sensed that, rather than falling, he was being shot upwards with successive violent gusts of rising air – blasts that were becoming increasingly violent. And then for the first time he felt the full force of the cloud.
‘It came with incredible suddenness – and fury. It hit me like a tidal wave of air, a massive blast, fired at me with the savagery of a cannon . . . I went soaring up and up and up as though there would be no end to its force.’ Rankin wasn’t the only one being hurled up and down. In the darkness around him, hundreds of thousands of hailstones were suffering the same fate. One minute they were falling downwards, dragging air down with them; the next minute, they were swept back up by the enormous convection currents within the cloud.
With this falling and rising, the hailstones picked up freezing water and grew in size, hardening layer by layer like gobstoppers. These rocks of ice pelted Rankin with bruising force. He was now vomiting from the violent spinning and pounding and he shut his eyes, unable to watch the nightmare unfolding. At one point, however, he did open them to find himself looking down a long black tunnel burrowing through the centre of the cloud.
‘This was nature’s bedlam,’ he said, ‘an ugly black cage of screaming, violent, fanatical lunatics . . . beating me with big flat sticks, roaring at me, screeching, trying to crush me or rip me with their hands.’ Then the lightning and thunder began.
The lightning appeared as huge, blue blades, several feet thick, which felt as though they were slicing him in two. The booming claps of thunder, caused by the explosive expansion of the air as the enormous electrical charge passed through, were so overpowering up close that they were more like physical impacts than noises. ‘I didn’t hear the thunder,’ he said, ‘I felt it.’ Sometimes he had to hold his breath to avoid drowning from the dense torrents of freezing rain. At one point he looked up just as a bolt of lightning passed behind his parachute. It lit up the canvas, which appeared to the exhausted pilot as an enormous, white-domed cathedral. As the image lingered above him, he thought that he had finally died.
CLOUDSPOTTERS WILL BE PLEASED to learn that Lt.-Col. William Rankin didn’t die. After his vision of the parachute billowing as a cathedral above him, he began to notice the air becoming less turbulent, the rain and hail losing intensity. He was finally emerging from the underside of the cloud.
In spite of his ordeal, Rankin managed to land successfully in a forest of pine trees. The storm was still raging, but on the ground it was nothing compared with what he’d experienced above. Finding that his limbs were not broken, the pilot managed to pick himself up and stumble in search of a road for help.
When he was later examined in the hospital at Ahoskie, North Carolina, the doctors reported that his body was discoloured from frostbite and covered in welts and bruises from the impact of the hailstones. His torso also showed impressions of the stitching of his flight jacket, which had strained against the expansion of his insides in the severe decompression after ejecting. The doctors were as amazed as Rankin was that he’d survived.
Moments after the pilot had landed in the forest, he had peered through the dim light of the storm and just made out the fluorescent hands on his watch. Under normal conditions, a parachute descent from 47,000ft could be expected to take around ten minutes. Given that he had ejected from his jet at exactly 6pm, he was stunned to see the watch read 6:40pm. Rankin had been buffeted up and down by the violent turbulence of the Cumulonimbus for a full forty minutes – no more than a pilot-shaped hailstone in the icy heart of the King of Clouds.
Rankin was on a 70-minute routine navigational flight from the South Weymouth Naval Air Station in Massachusetts to his squadron’s headquarters in Beaufort, North Carolina. Before take-off, he’d had a word with the meteorologist at the air base, who’d told him to expect isolated thunderstorms en route. The thunderclouds could be expected to reach altitudes of 30,000 to 40,000ft. For a decorated Second World War and Korean War vet like Rankin, this was fairly routine stuff. He knew his jet could reach 50,000ft comfortably and so he was confident of being able to fly over any storms without difficulty. That, of course, was assuming the engine wouldn’t conk out just as he was above one.
Forty minutes into the flight, as he was approaching Norfolk, Virginia, Rankin spotted the distinctive shape of a Cumulonimbus ahead. A storm was raging in the town below and the cloud rose in an enormous tower of puffy convection mounds, mushrooming out into a broad, wispy canopy at its top. The summit was at around 45,000ft – somewhat higher than he’d been led to expect by the official back at South Weymouth – so the pilot began a climb to 48,000ft to be sure of clearing it.
Rankin was directly over the top, at an altitude of 47,000ft and a speed of mach 0.82, when he heard a loud bump and rumble from the engine behind him. He watched in disbelief as the rpm indicator on his dashboard spiralled to zero in a matter of seconds and the bright red ‘FIRE’ light began flashing urgently.
Sudden and unexplained engine seizure like this is a one-in-a-million kind of emergency and Rankin knew that he would have to act fast. Without power, the jet’s controls became ineffective and he instinctively reached for the lever that deployed the auxiliary power package to restore emergency electricity. As he pulled the lever, however, he was horrified to feel it come away in his hands. This sounds like a moment worthy of Buster Keaton, but Rankin was finding it anything but funny. He was wearing just a lightweight summer flying suit. It was unheard-of to eject at this altitude at the best of times. To do so without a pressure suit would surely be suicide.
‘The temperature outside was close to –58˚F,’ Rankin later recounted. ‘Perhaps I would survive frostbite without permanent injury, but what about “explosive” decompression at almost ten miles up? And what about that thunderstorm directly below me? If it could be hazardous for an airplane in flight, what would it do to a mere human?’1
There was little time to ponder the dangers. In a matter of seconds, Rankin realised he had no option but to reach behind his head and yank with all his might on the ejection seat handles. At almost exactly 6pm, he exploded out of the cockpit and began his descent toward the cloud below.
‘AT FIRST THERE WAS no sensation of falling, only of zooming through the air,’ said William Rankin of the moments after he ejected from his stricken jet. Within seconds, he was suffering from the effects of the inhospitable environment at 47,000ft.
‘I felt as though I were a chunk of beef being tossed into a cavernous deep freeze,’ he remembered. ‘Almost instantly all exposed parts of my body – around the face, neck, wrists, hands and ankles – began to sting from the cold.’ Even more uncomfortable was the decompression caused by the low pressure at the top of the troposphere as he began the free fall until his parachute would automatically open. He was bleeding from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth as a result of the expansion of his insides, and his body became distended. ‘Once I caught a horrified glimpse of my stomach, swollen as though I were in well-advanced pregnancy. I had never known such savage pain.’ The one benefit of the extreme cold was that it began to numb his body.
In spite of the spinning, flailing nature of his free fall, Rankin managed to secure the emergency oxygen supply to his mouth. It was essential to remain conscious if he was to have any chance of surviving the descent. He was within the upper reaches of the storm cloud, with deteriorating visibility, when he saw on his watch that five minutes had passed since he had ejected. He should have passed the 10,000ft point by now – the height at which the barometric trigger in his parachute would cause it automatically to open. But there was no sign of the parachute. The poor pilot had already suffered an engine failure at 47,000ft, the jet’s auxiliary power lever coming off in his hand and having to eject directly over an enormous storm. Now it was beginning to look like he was hurtling through the air strapped to a parachute that didn’t work.
Deep within the ice-particle upper region of the Cumulonimbus it was dark with zero visibility. This made Rankin totally disorientated, with no idea of his altitude. For all he knew, without his parachute opening he might hit the ground at any moment. It was therefore with great relief that he felt the violent jolt as his parachute finally deployed.
The tension in the risers was enough to reassure him that it had fully opened. He was also relieved to find that, though his emergency oxygen supply had run out, the air at this level was now dense enough for him to be able to breathe without it. In the gloom of the enormous cloud, things appeared tobe looking up: ‘Under the circumstances, overjoyed to be alive and going down safely, consciously, even the increasing turbulence of the air meant nothing. It was all over now, I thought, the ordeal had ended.’ But the turbulence he was beginning to feel and the freezing hailstones starting to strike him meant that he was only now reaching the heart of the storm.
Ten minutes into his descent, Rankin should have been reaching the ground, but the enormous draughts of air that surged up the core of the cloud were retarding his fall. Soon the turbulence became much more severe. He had no visual point of reference in the gloomy depths but he sensed that, rather than falling, he was being shot upwards with successive violent gusts of rising air – blasts that were becoming increasingly violent. And then for the first time he felt the full force of the cloud.
‘It came with incredible suddenness – and fury. It hit me like a tidal wave of air, a massive blast, fired at me with the savagery of a cannon . . . I went soaring up and up and up as though there would be no end to its force.’ Rankin wasn’t the only one being hurled up and down. In the darkness around him, hundreds of thousands of hailstones were suffering the same fate. One minute they were falling downwards, dragging air down with them; the next minute, they were swept back up by the enormous convection currents within the cloud.
With this falling and rising, the hailstones picked up freezing water and grew in size, hardening layer by layer like gobstoppers. These rocks of ice pelted Rankin with bruising force. He was now vomiting from the violent spinning and pounding and he shut his eyes, unable to watch the nightmare unfolding. At one point, however, he did open them to find himself looking down a long black tunnel burrowing through the centre of the cloud.
‘This was nature’s bedlam,’ he said, ‘an ugly black cage of screaming, violent, fanatical lunatics . . . beating me with big flat sticks, roaring at me, screeching, trying to crush me or rip me with their hands.’ Then the lightning and thunder began.
The lightning appeared as huge, blue blades, several feet thick, which felt as though they were slicing him in two. The booming claps of thunder, caused by the explosive expansion of the air as the enormous electrical charge passed through, were so overpowering up close that they were more like physical impacts than noises. ‘I didn’t hear the thunder,’ he said, ‘I felt it.’ Sometimes he had to hold his breath to avoid drowning from the dense torrents of freezing rain. At one point he looked up just as a bolt of lightning passed behind his parachute. It lit up the canvas, which appeared to the exhausted pilot as an enormous, white-domed cathedral. As the image lingered above him, he thought that he had finally died.
CLOUDSPOTTERS WILL BE PLEASED to learn that Lt.-Col. William Rankin didn’t die. After his vision of the parachute billowing as a cathedral above him, he began to notice the air becoming less turbulent, the rain and hail losing intensity. He was finally emerging from the underside of the cloud.
In spite of his ordeal, Rankin managed to land successfully in a forest of pine trees. The storm was still raging, but on the ground it was nothing compared with what he’d experienced above. Finding that his limbs were not broken, the pilot managed to pick himself up and stumble in search of a road for help.
When he was later examined in the hospital at Ahoskie, North Carolina, the doctors reported that his body was discoloured from frostbite and covered in welts and bruises from the impact of the hailstones. His torso also showed impressions of the stitching of his flight jacket, which had strained against the expansion of his insides in the severe decompression after ejecting. The doctors were as amazed as Rankin was that he’d survived.
Moments after the pilot had landed in the forest, he had peered through the dim light of the storm and just made out the fluorescent hands on his watch. Under normal conditions, a parachute descent from 47,000ft could be expected to take around ten minutes. Given that he had ejected from his jet at exactly 6pm, he was stunned to see the watch read 6:40pm. Rankin had been buffeted up and down by the violent turbulence of the Cumulonimbus for a full forty minutes – no more than a pilot-shaped hailstone in the icy heart of the King of Clouds.
I just wanted to say I've thoroughly enjoyed this thread and the many directions it's taken. From conspiracy theories to an interesting and informative article all the way to an inspiring story of perseverance. Way to go PhantomPilots!
(I kind of hope it will keep going for many pages to come.)
(I kind of hope it will keep going for many pages to come.)
Its a conspiracy yes, but not a theory. I'm amazed at how many people think this is a joke when there are patents out for both the type of chemicals being sprayed as well as the delivery methods used in the aircraft. There are newer documentaries out there but a good one to start with is, "What in the world are they spraying."
There are also a number of whistleblowers in the aviation industry as well as the military who have confirmed geoengineering has been going on for decades. You can also do a search on NASA, Harvard, and various other govt funded companies' websites to see they are working on a geoengineering programs as well.
As someone who makes their living in the UAS industry, it's frustrating when the weather (and local radar) calls for clear blue skies, and I look out to see these trails expanding & turning the sky a greyish white for the rest of the day. Geoengineering watch . org has a bunch of good information as well as said govt documents.
You can choose to ignore it, that doesn't bother me, but it is happening.
There are also a number of whistleblowers in the aviation industry as well as the military who have confirmed geoengineering has been going on for decades. You can also do a search on NASA, Harvard, and various other govt funded companies' websites to see they are working on a geoengineering programs as well.
As someone who makes their living in the UAS industry, it's frustrating when the weather (and local radar) calls for clear blue skies, and I look out to see these trails expanding & turning the sky a greyish white for the rest of the day. Geoengineering watch . org has a bunch of good information as well as said govt documents.
You can choose to ignore it, that doesn't bother me, but it is happening.
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