I remember when I was a kid and I managed to stay up "way" past my bedtime I would see this signoff on the television that had Air Force jets leaving big lines in the sky and it had a phrase about "slipping the surly bonds of earth." I always liked that phrase and I like contrails sometimes still; especially at sunset. There is an article in Air & Space magazine at this link that talks a little about these things:
http://www.airspacemag.com/issues/2007/jun...light_Lines.phpQUOTE
It’s not only jets that make contrails; piston aircraft do too. So do rockets. So, apparently, do birds. “I have heard of wild geese leaving vapor trails high over the Canadian Rockies,” Guy Murchie wrote in his book Song of the Sky. A goose exhaling warm, moist air into –38-degree air could produce a contrail, Minnis allows, although “it would certainly be a small one.”
With all respects to Guy Murchie (whose writing my dad dearly loved) I'd pay to see a goose leave a contrail!
Later: I decided to look up the "surly bonds of earth" line and it comes from a poem called "High Flight" by a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot named John Gillespie Magee:
QUOTE
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless falls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor eer eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
A little bit much for more modern tastes but I like it!