The Sublime Beauty That Airplanes Leave Behind

I spend most days working from home, in my apartment in San Francisco’s Richmond District. When the morning fog has burned off, I throw on a hoodie and go for a walk. I head up a hill to a lookout spot from which I can survey the sky. It has become a daily ritual, a way to gauge my mood and remind myself of the scale of my concerns. One recent day, I walked to my perch and watched a plane make its way west, leaving behind it a silver thread. My flight-tracking app revealed this to be a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, traveling from Los Angeles to Tokyo. By the time it landed, its contrail still lingered in the sky above San Francisco.

Some people enjoy watching clouds, but I prefer contrails, those chalky lines left in the wake of aircraft at high altitudes, where the temperature and vapor pressure are low. The plane’s engines expel their hot, humid breath, which cools and condenses in the air, similar to how exhaling in cold weather creates a cloud of condensation. NASA lists three types of contrails: short-lived ones that form directly behind planes as they fly, then dissipate quickly; persistent, nonspreading trails that maintain their narrow form but can linger a long time; and persistent spreading trails that can fan out to cover a wide area.

On clear days, the resulting contrails are stark and white, accentuating the sky’s watery blue. At sunset, they’re cast in a dreamy golden shade. To me, their beauty derives in part from their incongruity with the sky’s naturally occurring features. The marks themselves are incidental — a quirk of atmospheric physics — but they sometimes seem like characters I follow in an otherwise impersonal sky. I recently took a photo of a trail following a plane flying above the Sutro Tower, rising from the city’s heart. Though the aircraft was at cruising altitude, the earth’s curvature made it appear to be flying diagonally, its nose pitched to the sun. Its movement made it seem cheeky, touched by an aura of optimism.

There is an uncanniness to contrails, a sense of something both familiar and alien — a cloud that seems to be imparting a message, if only we could decode it. At a residency that I attended recently in the Pacific Northwest, my fellow artists and I gathered outside the lodge before dinner to marvel at a thick, puffy band of white stretching all the way from one end of the sky to the other. The trail was so bold and assertive against an otherwise cloudless sky that we felt darkly intrigued, and stood around speculating on what type of plane might have created it. The mystery of the contrail lent it a special power that held us in its thrall, bonding us at that early moment in our friendship.

While contrails are not to be confused with the chemtrail conspiracy theory — which posits that exhaust from airplanes is laced with additives used to control the population — they are nefarious in more prosaic ways. They are now thought to contribute up to 35 percent of planetary warming caused by aviation, second only to carbon emission. Persistent spreading contrails are the most damaging, as these man-made clouds can blanket large swaths of sky, trapping heat in the atmosphere. Recent studies have suggested that the impact of contrails could be significantly reduced by pilots slightly altering their courses to avoid areas where contrails are likely to form, as they currently do to avoid patches of air where turbulence is likely. It’s possible that in a few years, contrails will be scarcer, relics of a less eco-conscious past, like aerosol cans and plastic-foam packaging.

Is it wrong to find beauty in something we know to be destructive? There’s admittedly something a little perverse about being a contrail enthusiast. For me, they conjure a sense of the sublime, a confrontation with something overwhelming and ineffable, as terrifying as it is beautiful. Traditionally, the sublime refers to encounters with the natural world, such as standing at the lip of the Grand Canyon, or witnessing the devastating power of a tsunami. I had a similar feeling on the infamous “orange day” in 2020, when the skies above San Francisco, and much of the West Coast, were dim and orange-hued because of wildfire smoke. I walked through the eerily transformed landscape of my neighborhood feeling a sense of negative awe. In that moment, I understood myself as a fragile mammal of tiny proportions relative to the scale of the planet and the climate crises that threaten it.

Contrails produce a similar effect for me. Sometimes when I look at one, I slip into an oceanic feeling — a sense of connectedness with the rest of the universe, as if a contrail is a tether between me and everything else. Unfortunately, “everything else” also includes the mass waste that we inflict upon the planet. Which is all to say: I’m not always in the mood to be charmed by contrails. On certain days, the contrails are stripped of their magic, revealed as noxious clutter. I imagine shaking the sky like an Etch-a-Sketch, ridding it of its vaporous waste.

Regardless of my mood, I can appreciate contrails as a physical record of humanity’s existence on this earth. I think about this as I observe a cross-thatching of persistent contrails, scars left by planes that have departed my little slice of the sky. They are ghostly forms reminding us of the plane that recently occupied this point in space, like the speed echo left by a cartoon character as they rush out of frame. I am here, and a moment later I’m elsewhere, but a shadow of my former self remains — for better or worse.