In an aluminum cigar

Flying during the night is tiring, and in the day it is boring. I finished a hefty daytime shot of whisky and depolarized a window to look out of the Dreamliner flying from Delhi to Shanghai. Some time earlier The Family had spotted the unmistakable profile of Everest poking out of the northern horizon. Now I looked down to see a network of rivers. A quick look at the flight map verified that we were flying over the floodplains of Bangladesh, a little north of Dhaka. Somewhere down there, if I knew where to look, would be the village where my grandmother was born.

A Dreamliner’s pace can seem slow, until you try to take a photo. Then you realize how quickly features in the landscape eleven kilometers below you slip away. After putting down my beer chaser, I found our path had curved past the Shan highlands of Myanmar towards Qunming. We were more than halfway to Shanghai, and sitting on top of a sea of white clouds. Time to click through the movie menu again.

13 hours in a aluminum box

My flight left JFK at 3 in the afternoon. Most brunch places in New York seem to open after 11. So this didn’t leave me enough time for a nice Sunday brunch. As a result, my main meal of the day was the dinner on the flight that we had soon after we took off. As always, cabin lights were dimmed after this in order to simulate night. The movies were not very interesting. I slid up the window shutter, turned the glass to transparent and peered out. We were somewhere over the north Atlantic, a little southwest of Reykjavik. There was a sea of clouds below me. The sky had turned a brilliant blue in the approaching dusk. Ten years ago I’d managed to take a photo of calving glaciers from a flght. No such luck this time.

I got myself something to drink, forced myself to watch a movie, and then fell asleep. When I woke we had crossed the Atlantic. I scrolled through the flight data and saw that we were a little south and east of Riga. I’ve never seen Riga, or the Baltic states. I popped the shutter open again. Light poured in. We were well above the sea of clouds which hid the north European plains below me. One of the cabin crew came by to ask me to pull down the shutter. They like people asleep. I complied, but then walked around the cabin for a while, did my stretches, drank some water. It was about 6 hours since we took off. Almost half way.

The second half of the long flight was excruciating. I watched parts of five movies. I dozed, ate, fell asleep again. I walked around the cabin, through the galley and back. I read all the newspapers that were available. I finished a Simenon and started another. Eventually the flight data told me that we were near Delhi. Now there was no objection to shutters being up. I took a photo of the first clear sky that I’d seen in half a day: the monsoon sky over Delhi. I was a little hop from home.