Two airliners in formation or following closely?

[corsair]

Not sure which forum to place this. But questions seems obvious. Nice bright sunny day here on the west coast of Ireland and obviously under the chosen track for transatlantics westbound.
A couple of contrails caught my eye, same direction and in trail, with the following aircraft occasionally apparently crossing the track of the first although that may be a consequence of upper air winds blowing the contrail around. Obvious thought was military, so dusted off the binos. Definitely airliners, twins, Airbus or Boeing I know not. The second appeared slightly higher but only a mile or so behind if that.
I never saw that before. So my curiousity was raised. Is this unusual? While they had vertical seperation. The horizontal seperation seemed very close.
Any ideas?

[ETOPS]

Corsair

What you saw is very common. There would have been 1000' vertically between those aircraft, horizontal seperation can be nil. As you correctly surmise you are at the start of the OTS and I have quite often passed over there in a "gaggle" of 4 or so different types in a band from 29000' to 35000'.

If the aircraft ahead is just far enough away, we can get caught in his wake so an offset of 1 or 2 miles to the right is flown for safety.

[corsair]

Thanks ETOPS, appropriately enough. That explains it. Indeed the trailer was the higher so he pretty much sat on the other aircraft's six. No risk of wake turbulence. I'd love to see a gaggle of four or so.

Not that familiar with the whole transatlantic procedure. Never get much above FL10 myself and my passengers usually make their own way back to the ground. :cool:

[Kiwiguy]

Back in the late Fifties BOAC used to operate a DC-3 freighter and a DC-3 passenger plane between Beiruit and Kuwait.

The guys used to horse around in formation over the desert to impress the passengers. Ah those were the days.

When the DC-3 was replaced by Argonauts there was one instance when an Argonaut lined up for take off at Kuwait. An engine caught fire, was extinguished and then feathered before take off, then the Captain took off with pax on three remaining engines.

BOAC sounds a whole lot more interesting airline than BA these days. Just can't beat those Wartime bomber pilots can you?