Oliver Morton
speaker
275 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Oliver Morton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And that only happens when the plane involved goes through an area which is crept up for contrailing.
These areas are areas where the air is cold, but it's also damp.
In fact, it's so damp that if you just put something in it around which ice could crystallize, the ice would crystallize.
And so it's not just the water that's coming out of the jet's exhaust that's going into the contrail now.
The contrails gathering up moisture from around it in order to make a much bigger cloud than the plane could make on its own.
Those are the contrails which do most of the warming work, and they only get made in these damp but cold areas, what are called in the trade ice supersaturated regions.
They're up towards the top of the lower atmosphere, what's called the troposphere, which is where air traffic mostly goes.
And so they're up above eight kilometers, maybe eight to 13 kilometers up in the sky.
And they tend to be very broad, but very thin.
People talk about them as pancakes.
They might be a few hundred kilometers across, but only a few hundred meters deep.
And so if you know where they are, you can normally avoid them simply by flying a little bit lower.
Well, that's part of what Operation Blue Skies is doing.
The change you need to make to stay out of one of these super saturated regions, these cold, damp pancake bits, is normally fairly small.
You can just drop down a few hundred meters and your problem is over.
That's what people who fly stealth bombers do because they don't like to leave contrails.
And so you're following the same path, but you're a little bit lower.
And that's the sort of thing that planes do anyway to avoid turbulence.
But the question of whether they can be asked to do it on a regular basis by air traffic control to avoid contrails and whether that can be done safely and routinely, that's one of the things that they're testing in Operation Blue Skies.
The other thing they're testing, of course, is that if you do this systematically, do you actually end up with a sky that has significantly fewer contrails in it?
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