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These two colorful graphics are from a British company that analyzes aerodynamic characteristics of military aircraft and weaponry.

The left image depicts the air currents generated by wingtips, specifically illustrating "entropy wake."  The wings also create "vortex wakes" which can thought of as horizontal tornadoes. On the company's website, the bright red graphic is captioned, "Vortex shedding from a chined forebody."

http://www.ara.co.uk/computational_fluid_dynamics.htm

The blue pic is the same as the red one, but I inverted the colors so the vortices would more closely match the smoke through which the object streaked, generating in its wake tiny tornadoes composed of black, blue and gray soot. It's also easier to see how the turbulence, indicated by the dotted lines, radiates from and around the body of the aircraft.

I went to google.com and typed "vortex" in the search box and quickly found the swirling image on the far left. The white and yellow portions represent the "vortex family" spinning away from the missile's body as viewed from the front. I "unswirled" the image, then blurred the lines, just as the "vortex tornadoes" would blend together creating a mass of disturbed air. Imagine a missile coming straight toward you with the  "vortex family" spinning away from the missile's body. Those tiny tornadoes stir up the smoky soot as the missile races toward you, leaving a wake, a long cylinder of disturbed smoke like a snake or the contrails of a high flying jet. But just as the white contrails would be invisible as the jet flew through a white cloud, the vortex snake created by the object is invisible within the cloud of smoke. Suppose you're in an airplane with the same straight flight path as a jet with a contrail streaming behind it, but you're ahead of the jet. If you could look back, you'd see the black nose of the jet surrounded by a circle formed by the expanding white contrail, like a wad of cotton candy with a hershey kiss stuck to the side. It's the same thing happening with the object and the cloud of smoke  In the picture on the left from the Washington Post, we see the object piercing through the gray cloud, but we only see the nose of the object and the larger, vortex-produced aura of disturbed smoke surrounding the object.

Two close-ups of the dot from the Washington Post picture.

A 2001 promotional pic from Lockheed Martin showing their latest stealth missile.

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