Wigan teenager shoots incredible video footage of passenger jets flying almost side by side

The teenager, who lives in Springfield, was sunbathing in his back garden on Monday around teatime when he heard the familiar roar of an aircraft overhead. Looking up, he couldn’t believe his eyes to see not one but two low-flying commercial jets flying incredibly close together and on almost exactly the same flight path.

"You don’t see that very often,” the teenager, who didn’t want to be named, exclaimed. “I’ve seen planes crossing paths quite closely before, usually at high altitude, but I’ve never seen them so close together going in the same direction, apart from at an airport when they are coming in to land.”

He continued: “I whipped out my phone and managed to get some footage. I’ve shown it to a few people and have had a mixed response. Some people think it’s amazing, others have just said ‘so what’ – but I’ve never seen anything like that before.

"They look incredibly close together but the thing that makes it weird is how they are almost flying in formation. It was like being at an air show!”

How close to each other are commercial aircraft allowed to fly

Commercial aircraft flying below 29,000 feet must maintain a vertical separation of 1,000 feet. And according to aviationvoice.com since aircraft cause wake turbulence that may affect other aircraft flying the same track at the same altitude, horizontal separation is much greater than vertical. In controlled airspace, the required minimum horizontal separation between aircraft flying at the same altitude is five nautical miles or 9 kilometres.