According to Brendt, she contacted the air traffic control tower at the Portland Jetport, where the ATC manager told her that nine jets had arrived/departed the Jetport. The Portland tower controls arriving and departing aircraft, but not the high altitude enroute traffic, which are controlled from the Boston Center (based in Nashua, NH). The Portland tower Air Traffic Control manager told Brendt that on their radar they normally filter out flights over 10,000 ft., because they only control that airspace.

Here are two images from the MODIS imager on the Terra satellite that
passed over Maine at 11:15 am EDT on March 12, 2001.


The IR picture below shows a few high clouds over Maine, a bright white
(cold, high cloud) oval area in southern Maine, and a triangular shaped
cloud in south central Maine. There appear to be a few spreading contrails
over Vermont and NY.

Contrail photograph taken by Dave Thurlow at Mount Washington Observatory, Conway, New Hampshire, the same town where WMWV Asst. News Director Richard Dean reported observing 370 "chemtrails" on March 12th.

Note that a large Military Operations Area is known to exist in western Maine, another in northern New Hampshire, and two special use areas off the coast of Maine.

The North Atlantic Corridor is the most heavily traveled air
corridor in the world, with over 600 flights/day to and from Europe
and North America. To facilitate organized Atlantic crossing,
the International Civil Aviation Organization(ICAO) has
established a North Atlantic Track(NAT) system of organized
flight corridors, which are changed each day to avoid storms and
jet stream winds. Due to these changing courses, planes may
deviate significantly in their point of arrival/departure over
US airspace from day to day.

The image below shows worldwide emissions from aircraft of NOx , a pollutant formed by all types of hydrocarbon combustion when nitrogen is combined with oxygen. The POLINAT study image #1 shows this pollution. Vertically integrated NOx emissions from aircraft including military according to the DLR2 data set (see Schmitt et al., DLR-Mitt. 97-04). Global emissions: 0.56 Tg(N) yr-1.

For all practical purposes, the distance that a contrail from an airplane flying 30,000 ft can be viewed is the maximum visibility allowed by atmospheric conditions. For example, the formula which can be used to calculate the actual distance D, as shown in the image at left, is:

where:
A = the contrail
h = altitude of the contrail ~6 miles(31,200ft)
r = 4000 miles(radius of the earth)
then d = (the square root of) (6X6)+ 2(4000)(6)
d= distance that a contrail would be visible
d=219 miles
It is thus shown that such a contrail would easily be visible for at least 50 miles, depending on the visibility and the height of the observer above the ground.

These calculations are the same as sailors use to find the distance to the horizon. William Thomas, who claims to be an experienced sailor, certainly knows this basis for terrestrial navigation.