And seeing it from 50 feet would all depend on lighting and what it had gathered onto its surface falling from 30,000 feet through a debri field.
So you don’t know what chaff is.
I’ve disbursed lots of it, and that isn’t chaff.
How do I know? Its visible. WWII chaff used against long wave search radars was large, modern chaff is designed to be used against microwave radars and is made of extremely small fiberglass dipoles. You might see it floating down from 10’ away (although it would be extremely disbursed at the ground) but you couldn’t possibly see it at 50’ or more.
When one explodes a passenger jet, you get a lot of debris, including a lot of insulation, tape, cloth, plastic, aluminum sheeting, carbon fiber, shoes, etc. That is what you are seeing.
Yep!
Plus all the little napkins, cups, seatback safety cards, airline mags, barf bags, skymall, etc.
I suspected as much; I’m very busy and never saw a comment about the falling debris.
That’s why I put this in chat. I’m an aviation buff, but I’ve never seen chaff of any type. Neither have I ever seen video of debris falling from mid-air disintegration of a commercial airliner.
The video of the plane getting hit shows it flying for at least a minute and a half before the video cuts off and it’s intact with the starboard engine on fire. It must have disintegrated at some point shortly thereafter at decent clip AGL, given the falling debris and breadth of the crash scene.
Interesting, nonetheless. Back to work...
We had ship launched chaff that had long streamers like this but it was massed together in much greater quantities and wouldn’t have sepearted out to single streamers in order to present a metallic mass to fool the radar. In addition it was much more reflective (visible light) than what appears in the video even at a distance.
Ours looked more like a firework display. Been to long so don’t remember if it had other things mixed in, but wouldn’t be suprised.
And seeing it from 50 feet would all depend on lighting and what it had gathered onto its surface falling from 30,000 feet through a debri field.