Contrail fun - 14:30 on Sunday Oct 28th 2012

Beautiful contrail seen over Melbourne. I was driving on Boronia Rd, heading approx West towards Eastlink. Contrail was almost coming straight at me, in the clear blue sky:

Later on friends on Facebook said it was  QFA64 (Johannesburg direct to Sydney).  Mmm, said I…as I had spent some time trying to find flights from Perth to NZ or Adelaide to NZ (that would be over that location at that time).  Plus I had no idea flights from South Africa to Sydney flew over Melbourne. Or did they?

I used the data from flight aware and converted it to Google Earth format. At 14:30 QFA64 was over Port Phillip Bay and heading NE; this direction confirmed by the 14:31 data which showed it near Wellington Rd and Blackburn Rd intersection.  Both points shown in yellow, with  manually drawn line by me. And there’s me in the car (red), with the plane almost heading straight at me (click on to enlarge to larger proportions) :

I love a good, modern, Internet-based, Google Earthy proof.