Introduction

@aeronautic/contrails draws the condensation trails an aircraft leaves at altitude, in React Three Fiber and three.js, in TSL for three's WebGPURenderer. Each engine trails its own:

• Forming a fraction of a second behind the nozzle, where its exhaust has cooled enough by mixing with the cold air round it to pass water saturation. The gap behind the engine is the time that takes.
• Frozen into ice as it cools past -38 °C, and from then on held at saturation over ice by the crystals in it.
• Carried down with the wake: drawn in to the vortex on its side and sunk with the vortex pair, a hundred-odd metres for an airliner.
• Spreading as it mixes: wider and thinner as it ages, at the rate measured behind airliners at cruise.
• Lasting seconds in dry air, or for as long as it is drawn in air supersaturated over ice, where it takes up the excess vapour and grows.

What drives itCopy Anchor Link

None of it is drawn to a shape or a timer. Whether a trail forms is the Schmidt–Appleman criterion for the day and the engines; how long it lasts is the day's humidity over ice; how wide and how dense it is at each age follows from how much fuel it burns and how much air the exhaust has mixed with.

The dials split the way the physics does. Each is a physical quantity in SI units:

• airframe: what the aircraft is. Its mass, its span, its lift-to-drag ratio, how thirsty its engines are, and where they are.
• fuel: what it burns. Kerosene, hydrogen, or your own numbers.
• flight: what it is doing. Airspeed, angles and load factor.
• air: the day. Altitude, temperature and humidity.
• look: how it is lit. The sun and the sky.

RequirementsCopy Anchor Link

• React 19, React Three Fiber 9 (or 10), three 0.186.
• A WebGPURenderer. It falls back to WebGL 2 by itself where WebGPU is missing. The classic WebGLRenderer is not supported.

It pairs with @aeronautic/afterburner and @aeronautic/wing-vapor on the same aircraft, but needs neither. Inside a <FlightProvider> from @aeronautic/core, it reads the airspeed, the angles, the load factor and the day from the shared flight.

Next, install it.