Any way to tell how high this FedEx plane is flying?
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Thanks, but note that the poster has been a member since 2013 and has more than 30 previous posts.
It looks like the plane goes from an angle of about 20 deg or so off of the nose to about 20 deg or so off of the tail over the 30-ish seconds of video. That looks like an MD-11 which according to The Google has a cruising speed of roughly 550 mph (other similar jets will have about the same cruising speed if my plane identification is a bit off). If I did my math right, then that’s about 9 miles per minute and over 30 seconds it would have gone roughly 4 1/2 miles. With those angles, that puts it at roughly 2 1/2 miles away from the camera. The plane isn’t directly overhead, so it’s at an altitude of maybe 2 miles or so.
This assumes that the plane is at full cruising speed. If it’s going slower, like maybe only 300 mph, then it’s altitude will be lower. At that altitude it might be taking off or landing, which would again explain the slower speed.
So my best guess is it’s at an altitude of somewhere between about 6,000 and 10,000 feet, depending on how fast it’s going.
It’s nowhere near the typical jet altitude of 30,000 to 40,000 feet.
I don’t think there is an accurate way to judge its distance without something else in the shot to give scale.
It’s an MD-11, so its 57 feet 9 inches high.
Want to know how wide it is, too?
If we assume the beginning and ending zoom correspond to normal human vision, then the aircraft is pretty much a dot at that zoom level. You can find it amongst the clouds, but not easily.
Which implies a pretty good distance away, say 8-15 miles. We also see the airplane behind cloud types not commonly seen much below 25000 feet.
So my vote is the airplane is at near cruise altitudes, and therefore doing about cruise speed, which would be about 500 mph. The altitude could be anywhere between, say, 29,000 and the MD-11’s service ceiling of 43,000. McDonnell Douglas MD-11 - Wikipedia
I think we’d be real hard pressed to get more precise than that. If the camera had elevation, azimuth, and focal length info imposed on the image we could do some trig. Having even the zoom factor alone would be helpful. Right now we’re stuck doing trig on ballpark numbers.
They are using an off the shelf Nikon P900 camera and lens.
An MD-11??? Oh really?
The video says it’s a 200 times lens, the P900 only has an 83 time lens.
Cute.
I recall a scene from early in USAF pilot training. Part of the game was to learn absolutely every factoid in the aircraft manual, no matter how obscure. We’d quiz each other relentlessly. As would the instructors. The airplane (T-37B) wasn’t very complex, so the manual writers had inserted a lot of gratuitous trivia factoids to prepare you for learning much more complex aircraft later.
So one day the instructor in charge of the daily inquisition first asks some length, width, gross weight kind of questions. Mostly softballs but one about gear strut travel stumped most of the class.
Then comes “What’s the height of the pitot tube?” Guys are baffled; lots of embarrassed head-scratching. How could we all not know that answer??!?. You touch it during every preflight and it’s about hip-high. Finally somebody tentatively ventures “Sir? It’s 3 feet 2 inches above the ground.? I think.?”
To which the IP bellows: “Wrong!!! Lt. Johnson, it depends on your altitude!” Cue groans all around. We’d been had. But good.
They never certified the winglets for the DC-10 so by default it has to be an MD-11.
If it’s above the cirrus clouds that puts it above 18,000 feet on average.
Reminds me of this old joke:
Air traffic controller hears the following agitated radio transmission: “We’re in a small airplane! The pilot - he passed out! I don’t know how to fly this thing!”
ATC transmits: “Calm down sir - we are trained to help with this sort of problem. Can you tell me your height and position?”
The reply (very agitated): “Yes! I’m five foot nine and I’m in the right front seat!”
That’s why I said “possible”. Since ascertaining a factual answer seems unlikely, it seemed like a plug for that “beast of a camera”. No harm, no foul right?
The wimp website says 200x lens. The actual video on youtube is accompanied with other Nikon P900 videos.
So you are saying that MD-11 and DC-11 are interchangeable in common man parlance? Put MD or DC 11 in Google Images & you get the same page so I guess it is an MD. Go to the AA maintenance base and ask the mechanics what they call them.
Put MD-6B in Google Images and see what you get. ‘snicker’
You are correct, it is not a DC-11, it is an MD-11. 
? Why do you not call the DC-10 an MD-10?
The MD-11 was a later derivative / upgrade of the DC-10. DC-11 was never correct terminology.
The DC vs MD thing is a product of corporate mergers and marketing.
Douglas built airliners and named them DC-X dating back to the DC-1, DC-2, and legendary DC-3. McDonnell only ever built fighters. McDonnell bought Douglas to create McDonnell-Douglas in 1967. A that time the Douglas DC-9 was in production and the Douglas DC-10 was on the drawing boards.
As is typical of mergers, the internal politics were brutal and Douglas was starved of capital and treated as a cash cow to subsidize McDonnell. So Douglas’s pipeline of new products dried up as the DC-10 entered service.
The first aircraft out of the combined entity was an updated stretched derivative of the DC-9 called the MD-80. “MD” was chosen to make sure everybody knew this was a new era and that McDonnell was in charge. “80” referring to the year it went into service.
Different engine upgrades and fuselage stretches followed termed the MD-81, -82, and -83. Only an expert can tell them apart from the outside and MD-80 remained the generic term for all of them.
Subsequent derivative derivitives of the MD-80 were named the MD-90 and MD-95. The MD-90 sold poorly and the MD-95 never made it off the drawing board before Boeing bought McD-D in 1997. Which they did for two reasons. To get the profitable DoD fighter franchise at McDonnell. And to kill the competing Douglas airliner business once and for all; something they had tried and failed to do through the marketplace for 70 years.
Boeing promptly killed the MD-90 and renamed the MD-95 as the Boeing 717. Then killed the 717 it as soon as corporate politics permitted and they thought they could safely renege on promises they’d made to various politicians about keeping the Douglas product line alive and the Douglas factories open.
After getting the MD-80 in the air Douglas under McDonnell also decided to update the DC-10. Once again trying to eke out a future while being starved of capital for new products.
This derivative was named the MD-11. It was a stretch of the longest model of DC-10. Plus winglets and a glass 2-man cockpit versus the mechanical 3-man cockpit of the DC-10. The winglets are the only obvious external recognition feature.
Not too many MD-11s were sold. The three-engine three-pilot era was ending, at least for passenger service. They did make good freighters though.
To further muddy the waters, after Boeing bought Douglas they came up with the idea of refreshing existing DC-10s with the MD-11 cockpit. This, along with a conversion from passenger to freighter, proved a pretty popular way to recycle run-out DC-10s. These hermaphrodites are called MD-10s, mixing both the old and the new style designators. There’s no way to tell a non-upgraded DC-10 from an MD-10 from the outside.
And now you know …
The rest of the story.
It goes a bit further. They made a DC-10 “heavy” which was the DC-10-30 with a center gear. It’s the transition in the evolution of the platform that led to the MD-11. They actually tested a winglet for the DC-10 but never pursued it for financial reasons. The reason you don’t see the MD-11 winglets retrofitted is that the wing is different between the 2 planes. So if you see a winglet it’s an MD-11.
This article links to the same video and says it’s from a Canon PowerShot SX50 HS with a 24-1200mm equilvalent lens. A 1200mm lens has a view angle of 1.15 x 1.72 degrees. This plane appears to subtend about 2/3 of the width of the frame. Assuming it shows a 200-ft long plane viewed directly from the side, that would imply the plane was about 10,000 ft (1.9 miles) away.
That’s the distance from the camera to the plane. The altitude is harder to estimate, but assuming the plane was about 45 degrees elevation as seen from the camera, the altitude would be about 7100 ft.
Find an object (building, etc.) that is about the same length as a plane of that type (or separation between two objects). Stand where the object fills the same amount of view finder as the plane in the zoon view. Determine the distance to the object. Multiply by 200, to get the distance to the plane. Estimate the shooting angle to the plane and do the trig.