Shifted Position
N38°52.23′ W143°17.29′
0345 ZULU
The sun is setting just behind our left wing, a fuzzy orange glow on the horizon line permeating through the wispy clouds. I turn sideways in my seat and watch over my left shoulder as the warm tones fade away into the blues and grays of night. Despite the sunlight still pouring in through the glass and the yellow, transparent shades pulled across the side windows, there is a sharp chill to the air in the cockpit. I turned on my foot warmers—electric plate heaters in the footwell that provide dubious results—almost immediately after takeoff and have been steadily inching up the air temperature control on the overhead panel, though with no warming success.
I have a jacket in my bag that is sitting in the closet directly behind me, but the FO’s bag is in front of it, and I haven’t gotten cold enough yet to put in the effort of moving his to get to mine. I’ve also been feeling way behind the curve and too busy to get up anyways. This is my first unsupervised flight as Captain, and with the training wheels now fully off, I’m responsible for the two hundred and eighty-four passengers and crew behind the cockpit door. The last time I was in charge, the plane only held fifty people and a single flight attendant. The 11 years since then has brought three new airplane types to my FAA certificate, and a whole lot of flight hours, but right now I’m mostly relying on hard-won judgment and experience from long ago.
All things considered, so far it’s been a pretty straightforward day. The FO, although only on property for two years, is sharp and has been keeping me out of trouble. The senior flight attendant is in the single digits on their seniority list and has been handling cabin issues before they can bubble up to us. The weather has been mostly good, beyond some gusty winds when we took off and some forecasted turbulence near Seattle at our arrival time, and the aircraft is behaving well. I even had a few seconds to admire the sea spray coming off wind-whipped wave tops as we blasted off the runway at Maui two hours ago.
Things have finally started to slow down, and despite the creeping cold and the coming darkness, I am feeling more caught up. With the sun fully gone over the edge of the earth, I slide the sunshades back into their homes for tomorrow’s crew to pull back out, and watch the terminator line slide overhead, dragging its blanket of darkness behind it. The first star of the evening pops up on the horizon in front of us, pulsing red and white as its light waves separate, some slowed more by the thickness of the atmosphere they are pushing through. Moments later, I watch the world turn fully to night from our small ship, floating on an invisible sea, under the bowl of the black and blue-bruised sky.
As the bruising fades to full blackness, it’s punctured only by the scattered dust of the stars. High and to the north, a recently launched train of Starlink satellites comes into view, stretching across hundreds of miles of real estate, gliding to the east as the earth rotates underneath each of them. It is fully dark down here, but 320 miles above us where the metal cubes hurtle through the just short of vacuum of low earth orbit, the sunlight is still peaking around the end of the globe, and it reflects off their solar panels, lighting up the entire chain like a line of phosphorescent marching ants. I make a call to the flight attendants asking if any of them want to come up to see the unusual sight, but before they can get up to the cockpit the train slides out of the sun’s rays, and the satellites fade away to nothingness.
We trudge northeastward towards the invisible coastline that is creeping ever nearer. I’m still cold, but the glow of the cockpit lighting provides enough emotional warmth that I leave my jacket in my bag. I adjust my seat slightly, still hunting for the perfect position on this side of the cockpit. The electric motor hums and the seat slides along its tracks. Moving down an inch and back two inches slightly changes my perspective of the flight instruments and cockpit switches, but on the other side of the windshield’s cold glass, the stars don’t even budge. I stare out at them and contemplate how long it’s taken for their light to reach us. It’s been a long journey for me to get to where I am now, but on the grand scale of the galaxy, it hasn’t even been a blink.
