Flight path forms perfect shape of Christmas tree

A passenger jet test crew spread festive cheer over Germany by flying a route that formed a perfect picture of a Christmas tree.

The path of the Airbus A380, as captured by flight tracking website FlightRadar, traced the shape of a fir tree festooned with baubles between Hamburg and Stuttgart.

The design took almost five and a half hours to create - luckily, there were no passengers on board the flight, which was a test of an aircraft destined to join Dubai carrier Emirates.

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Airbus tweeted that the festive route was an “early Season’s Greetings” from its test pilots.

“It was the idea of test pilots and engineers,” a spokesperson for the plane manufacturer told the Daily Telegraph, adding that flight test routes were “flexible”.

This isn’t the first time a test crew has got creative with its route, says NPR. In August, a Boeing 787-8 pilot made things meta by plotting a course which drew an outline of the plane itself, stretching from Texas to Michigan.

Creative flight patterns don’t always go down well, however, says the BBC. Last month, a US Navy pilot was “strongly reprimanded for using contrails to trace a penis over the state of Washington”.