on Thursday afternoon 3 aircraft in close parallel formation crossed across the sky above me in Coventry (UK) heading from roughly West towards roughly E direction.

They appeared very close together horizontal separation wise and were showing identical vapour trails.

Does anyone have any idea what was going on as they were not in the normal pattern coming into the UK from across the pond.

I have some pictures that I can upload if that may help.

thanks, Gordies

Military exercise?

Are we talking contrail level - yeh. They were prob military and either going from A to B (Tornadoes typically tour around at FL200 or whatever direction they are travelling - and / or you may see a lovely photo of a tornado one day from anonther Tornado this flight. They may have been Eurofighters - send the photos, Bernoulli knows how to upload them - so do others. Go-ahead, we wanna see. Most of the people on here may be able to i.d. the aircraft types if they can get a handle on the shape. (aircraft recognition and all that)

Also, you can help yourself, a bit, if you look you can identify single or twin contrails therefore reducing your process of elimination. hope this helps. But when you are looking, try to see where they came from going to / as: the visual range is about the square root of your height (what are you about 5 foot 8 ins?) and the sqrt of the aircraft height times 1.25 the will give you a `theoretical range` so you can be looking at stuff which is way over europe or S.Ireland or even further as the slant range is the line of sight range - what I am trying to say is you can then ascertain where they came from or are going to - i.e., base up here......ranges down there. . . . could be the Germans coming back from the U.S. could be a pair of jet-set playboys in their Falcon jets, could be the Yanks going to bases in Germany or Eur. having fuelled over the pond some where. could be NATO Harriers from a carrier back to a base in Germany, I had better stop guessing now as little red laser dots are forming on my head.