They're just contrails, youre crazy!
(media.scored.co)
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What passenger aircraft "fly zig-zag" across the sky? You'd think the passengers would, you know, notice that!
The high-altitude winds can push the vapor trails this way and that, they are entirely unrelated to surface winds.
I watched them too as a child. One trail would get pushed, making a shape similar to the "cents" symbol. Another would come along & the same thing would happen. The planes were flying straight even if the vapor trails were not.
We had a lot more planes overhead back then, the routes have changed over the decades. I'm up in Manitoba eh? If you go farther north, like to Easterville MB? You can hear the jets overhead but unless there's a vapor trail they're really hard to see! So the trails have a high correlation to humidity, perhaps 1:1. No vast conspiracy required.
I'm not ruling it out, the US army did spray my city with a radioactive agent back in '58 & City Hall kept it a secret for 40~odd years...
As someone who's actually flown planes, there's actually a reason they might, albeit you are highly unlikely to see it a ton with passenger planes for obvious reasons.
There are a few different manuevers to "slow down" the trajectory of a plane and sometimes taking "S-turns" is one of them. It's not like a car where you can put on the brakes. In the air a plane gets too slow it ceases being a flying object and becomes a falling one. Being that this is also how a plane lands, by slowing down so much at just the right time that the plane no longer flies, they are often going quite slow when near the ground. So if there's a problem and you are approaching the plane in front too quickly, you can S-turn (weave) from side to side to go slower. Remember too that these turns may be huge from the perception of being inside the plane in the air, and appear small on the ground.
So, if you have a busy airport where 10 planes all show up around the same time with the intent to land, they have to be sequenced somehow. ATC will have the pilots more often fly in a holding pattern or a circle than S-turns, but that's not to say S-turns never happen. Same as if you're on a plane that may have some trouble. That doesn't mean it's about to crash, just that something doesn't check out to the pilots satisfaction they may choose to remain in the air, which is relatively safe, and sort it out. That would be some sort of holding pattern too. There are loads and loads of reasons planes just don't fly in straight lines from point A to B.
But the planes making vapor trails aren't the ones coming in to land. They're in mid-flight and unlikely to be climbing or descending very much at all. They can easily throttle up or down if (for example) headwinds increase or decrease. No need to put unnecessary strain on the aircraft by making unneeded maneuvers.
They don't fly in a straight line on long distance hauls, they use the curvature of the Earth to make the trip shorter! You know that of course. That means a big curve on the map, but essentially straight while in mid-flight. Scheduled turns (course adjustments) are common I'm sure.
A lot of the ones I've noticed looked pretty clearly on a higher stage of an ascent, but I've also rarely noticed zig-zags. They could be fighter jets, which fly around a lot more than most might think and aren't super predictable in what they do.
Still though, I'm checking out of this discussion now. I'm not sure there's an on ramp to convince me, and it's because of what I said before. I just do not have the mindset to sprint to maximum complicated conspiracy when the easy solution is feasible. If the government/world were to alter weather or poison the populace or something, they could find much simpler ways than a complex conspiracy to secret manipulate passenger airplanes for decades to distribute whatever. Sometimes the answer is the obvious one, not the full tinfoil hat.