Sorry but I hope your pilot wasn't on duty at the time. 300,000 feet is
quite absurd and I doubt that the information comes from anywhere. It is
more than 10X too high even for exceptionally high flying birds. As one
metre is a bit more than 3 feet. 300,000 feet is about 91 km high. About
6000 metres is the close to the limit to bird height flight of things like
geese flying over mountains. In a fairly flat country like Australia, I
reckon Pelicans would rarely need to go over 1 or 2 km altitude at least
above land altitude.
These extracts from Wikipedia:
Highest flying. There are records of a Rüppell's Vulture Gyps rueppelli, a
large vulture, being sucked into a jet engine 11,550 m (37,900 feet) above
Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa. The animal that flies highest most regularly
is the Bar-headed Goose Anser indicus, which migrates directly over the
Himalayas between its nesting grounds in Tibet and its winter quarters in
India. They are sometimes seen flying well above the peak of Mount Everest
at 8,848 m (29,028 feet).
The atmosphere becomes thinner and thinner with increasing altitude, with no
definite boundary between the atmosphere and outer space. The Kármán line,
at 100 km (62 mi), or 1.57% of the Earth's radius, is often used as the
border between the atmosphere and outer space.
Philip
-----Original Message-----
From: Elizabeth Compston
Sent: Friday, 2 August 2013 8:14 PM
To: Birds Canberra
Subject: birds--pelicans
I wrote a message yesterday to the pilot of a QANTAS plane that I was on,
telling him that it had been reported that pelicans can fly as high as
300,000 feet, and asking him. If you were at a height of 30,000 feet near
Sydney, would you be able to see rain falling in central Australia. He
reputed the idea that pelicans fly that high. So, where did the information
come from, about the height that pelicans can fly? and is it a myth?
Elizabeth
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