Mystery Picture: F/A-18 Hornet breaks the sound barrier
Ensign John Gay dips his
camera fast to keep the plane in the viewfinder as the Hornet plummets towards
the aircraft carrier, Constellation. Speed building, altitude
diminishing---vapor flickers off the plane's curved surfaces. Seventy-five
feet above the Pacific Ocean, rippling in the plane's jet blast, and 200 feet
from the bobbing deck of the carrier---a vapor oval blossoms about the plane.
Gay hears the sonic boom.
"I clicked the same time I heard the boom and I knew I had it." This
fantastic picture.
Dropping pressure causes the
cloud to form. As the plane exceeds the speed of sound, it outruns all
pressure and sound waves and creates a sonic boom. As the jet passes the
pressure waves, the dropping pressure condenses water in the air and creates a
cloud.
Gay watched the spectacle
above the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and Japan on July 7, 1999. "You
see this vapor flicker around the plane that gets bigger and bigger. You
get this loud boom and it's instantaneous. The vapor cloud is there, and
then it's not there. It's the coolest thing you have ever seen."
Image Credit: Ensign John Gay,
photo officer for Fighter Squadron Two (VF 2).
Nikon 90 S 35 mm camera. Gay set his 80 -
300 mm zoom lens on 300 mm, set his shutter speed at 1/1000 seconds with an
aperture setting of F5.6. Full manual. The plane is too fast for
auto.
Further Surfing:
M.S.
Cramer, Virginia Tech: what causes condensation in airflows
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