Does a video on social media show what it looked like when a pilot accidentally hit the "chemtrail switch" too early while taking off in -45 degrees Celsius in Siberia? No, that's not true: The false caption poking fun at chemtrail conspiracists originated with an r/aviation forum Reddit repost with a satire tag. This video, originally posted in 2012 by a Russian aviation photographer, shows contrails visible at ground level due to the extremely cold temperatures. Conspiracists frequently conflate condensation trails or contrails, which are real and are composed almost entirely of water vapor, with "chemtrails," which are not a real thing.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on July 31, 2024. It was captioned:
Pilot in Siberia accidentally switches on stratospheric aerosol injection during takeoff creating ground Chemtrail.
This is how the post appeared on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Aug 1 16:23:14 2024 UTC)
The post on X features a shaky handheld video of a computer screen playing a video of a plane taking off as it appeared in a post on Reddit. Although it does show in the X post, the satire tag of the original Reddit post is not easy to make out. A detail is provided in the screenshot of the original Reddit post pictured below. The May 2, 2022, post in r/aviation was titled, "When you hit the ((Chemtrail)) switch too early by mistake , (Contrails at -45° takeoff in Siberia)."
(Source: Reddit screenshot taken on Thu Aug 1 16:23:14 2024 UTC)
A reverse image search for the screenshot above brought up the original December 29, 2012, YouTube video (pictured below) posted by Dmitry Belov, an aviation photographer based in Yakutsk, Russia, the coldest city in the world. Belov maintains a profile on airliners.net where additional photos of this specific plane can be found. The twin engine Tupolev Tu-204 plane pictured is from the cargo airline Aviastar-TU.
The YouTube video is titled, "Airport Yakutsk UEEE Take off t-45C Tu-204 RA-64021" (this would be -49 degrees Farenheit). Another video posted by Belov on January 10, 2024, showing several planes taking off in -47 degrees Celsius (-52.6 degrees Farenheit) temperatures is titled, "Takeoff B-737 An-24 A320, t -47C." As with the Tu-204 in the original video, the planes in Belov's 2024 video are also producing contrails at ground level in the extremely frigid Siberian air.
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Thu Aug 01 18:19:32 2024 UTC)
In September 2000 the Environmental Protection Agency, along with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration, produced a six-page PDF factsheet (archived here) on aircraft contrails. This explains contrail formation under specific circumstances between humidity and temperature:
For a contrail to form, suitable conditions must occur immediately behind a jet engine in the expanding engine exhaust plume. A contrail will form if, as exhaust gases cool and mix with surrounding air, the humidity becomes high enough (or, equivalently, the air temperature becomes low enough) for liquid water condensation to occur.
At ground level this balance is rarely met, due to air temperatures being much warmer than at the altitudes where contrails are usually seen -- but when the ground level temperature is -47 degrees Celsius, as it was in Yakutsk, a plane's warm and moist exhaust can produce a contrail on the runway just as it might when cruising at 35,000 feet. A "Contrail Identification Chart and Formation Guide" produced by NASA (found here) features ten diagrams to illustrate this principle.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks addressing false claims about chemtrails can be found here.
