"AES" wrote in message ...
In article ,
Nathan Young wrote:

On 07 Dec 2005 00:36:05 GMT, Blanche wrote:

An advertisement for Sci-Fi Channel's new mini-series?

Well, this did happen in the Minneapolis area, so perhaps it had
something to do with the light pillars mentioned a day ago. :-)

I could throw in some more than usually uninformed speculation (even for
this group . . . ) about a random dot of frost forming, causing the
airflow to spread out laterally just a bit; gases cool when they expand
(happens in nozzles and many types of refrigerators); result is more
frost forming in the region just behind the dot; and the
forward-pointing triangle grows toward the rear of the plane.

Fits the available data presented thus far, and stranger things happen
in gas and liquid flows all the time -- but I have no idea if anything
like this is really happening here.

Yes, maybe that is the area where the boundary layer was breaking from laminar flow to turbulent flow. It may be a new
way to figure out where to place the vortex generators...