An Antonov Departs in the Murk

The IL-76 departure was not the only Volga Dnepr jet heading out that morning.  An AN124 was also in and they scheduled their departures within 30 minutes of each other.  I wasn’t passing the Ruslan up given that I was already there.  The weather was still crummy but this did mean that there was a lot of moisture showing up as the pressure dropped.  The 124 was loaded up a bit more so ran a lot longer on the takeoff run and rotated not far from where I was.  The moisture in the air resulted in some nice puffs over the wing surface and it was trailing vortices from rotation all through the climb out until it disappeared into the clouds.  It actually was pulling its own cloud for a while as it neared the cloud base and I thought it had gone into the cloud at first but it cleared up again for a moment before it did finally enter the clouds.

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