Courtesy of Glen Carter at NTV News: First Edition, here is a screen cap from the Marystown video taken on the same Monday evening people saw unidentified flying objects near Harbour Mille.
1. The contrails are plainly visible and have both the reddish and the dark characteristics seen in the image from Harbour Mille.
2. The aircraft making the contrails is plainly visible in one portion of the video. It is a twin-engined commercial jet – similar to an Airbus A310/A320 or an Embraer 190 -of the type that routinely fly in that area on the way to and from St. John’s.
3. The multi-coloured splotch on the right side of the picture is either sun glinting off the airframe or a strobe light on the aircraft. Remember that this is essentially a single “frame” of the video. There may well be things in the shot that wouldn’t be as prominent in the full video.
4. The angle of this shot is somewhat unusual. It appears the aircraft flew directly over the shooter and in this particular shot is proceeding away from the camera. The camera also appears to be max’ed out on zoom. In the video, the aircraft is seldom if ever steady in the centre of the frame.
5. While it isn’t quite so clear in this shot, there is a gap between the back end of the engine and the start of the contrail.
Flightaware.com Update:
flightaware.com is a great resource. Here’s a screen cap taken – as the time stamp shows at about 1800 hrs local or 2130 Zulu. That would be 6:00PM to normal people.
The red dot is about where Harbour Mille would be on this crude map. The blue track is the official flight path for Air Canada’s flight 695, an Embraer 190 run from St. John’s (YYT) to Pearson (YYZ) with a stop at Halifax along the way. The yellow line is the actual track as it showed up on flightaware.com. Allow for inaccuracy given the crude nature of the map.
It was an airplane folks.
-srbp-