Delta Airlines Flight 67

I was sitting on my shop step late this afternoon watching the hens run around the yard. The sun was shining for the first time in about a week or more, there was no wind, and everything was beautifully quiet.

I heard a strange noise that seemed to come from far away, sort of a thud. Machinery from farms or nearby bridge repairs pass by occasionally, but I didn’t hear a vehicle.

Then I heard a jet, a common enough thing where I live, but when I looked up, instead of seeing a plane flying east to Europe or west to the rest of North America, directly overhead was a plane flying south. I could see the wings glinting at an odd angle, and it looked to be lower than the usual 35,000 or whatever feet above.

Suddenly a contrail was visible as the plane disappeared from view. When I clicked on a flight radar site, there was Delta Airlines Flight 67 from Rome to Atlanta but no longer heading to Atlanta.

The flight track log shows the plane going over our house between 4:08:42 and 4:09:13, and I took the photo at 4:10. Their southwesterly track changed right off North Cape at 4:06 and by the time I saw it four minutes later, it had dropped from 11,582 meters (37,998 feet for you metric/imperial