North/South

N57°27'48", W136°12'31"

2350 ZULU

The Alexander Archipelago stretches away into the distant haze of the southeastern horizon like a sheet of crumpled construction paper. In the opposite direction, the sun is accelerating towards the curve of the Earth, causing the cuts, valleys, fjords, and gorges 37,000 feet below us to disappear into the shadows of late afternoon. Across the cockpit from me the FO has his shades drawn against the high-altitude glare of the sun, but my side windows, facing east, are in shadow and uncovered, providing an unrestricted view of the rocky landscape scrolling by below.

We flew over this point in space—but heading in the opposite direction—just four hours ago, first paralleling the Canadian and then the Alaskan coastline northward, as the latitude numbers clicked downward on the digital flight display. This is a somewhat rare two-leg day for us, hauling people and supplies up to Anchorage and then, after a two-hour sit, hauling the last of the season’s salmon run—and more people—southward, back to the urban environs of Seattle. With the end of the day almost in sight, I lean back in my seat, attempting to stretch out the compressed vertebrae of my back and neck.

The ride south has been smooth for the past hour, ever since passing through 20,000 feet over Montague Island, and out into the Gulf of Alaska. I glance up at the overhead panel to make sure that I do in fact have the seatbelt sign turned off. It is. We’ve been in and out of turbulence the whole day, so the current status of the switch has become something of a blur. Earlier this morning, just after departing Seattle, while skimming the cloud tops as we climbed out over the eastern edge of Olympic National Park, the FO had wisely commented that with the high winds forecasted for our arrival into Anchorage, we should take every opportunity to turn off the seatbelt sign when we could before the ride got too bad farther to the north.

Now, hours after that conversation, on the Seattle return, Sitka passes by—a linear slash of white and gray buildings standing between the dark green of the land and the deep blue of the surrounding water. In the late afternoon light, a single cruise ship, the Princess logo on its superstructure only visible through the zoom of my camera’s lens, is pinned to the end of a white wake that tracks straight out towards a calm, open sea that mirrors the smooth skies above it.

Heading north at this same spot several hours back, the FO’s earlier suggestion was proving to be a good one. With an updated Anchorage weather report calling for winds of 60 miles per hour spilling out of the Chugach Mountains, I’d made a quick announcement to the cabin advising the passengers to take care of any last minute business they might have that involved standing up, as the smooth ride wouldn’t last for much longer and the seatbelt sign would be coming on soon.

Just forty-five minutes later, we were met with bone-rattling turbulence as we descended across the spine of the Chugach and traced the deeply eroded path of the Knik River towards Anchorage and the airport beyond. Harsh rays of sunlight strobed through breaks in the scud layer of clouds above us as we skimmed over the Knik Arm and the marshy bog lands at its western banks. The light illuminated the cockpit in a series of uneven flashes that were increasingly mismatched with the lurches and groans of the airframe as the plane pushed through the turbulent air.

Minutes later, with the runway at Anchorage rapidly approaching, we lurched and bumped towards it in a conga line of big freighter jets, our 275 passengers the sole exception to the steady stream of inbound cargo planes.  As we descended through 2000 feet, passing back across the waters of the Knik Arm one final time, the wind died off, leaving the puffs of smoke from the tires of the landing UPS 747 in front of us lingering over the pavement of the runway and the orange windsock at its edge relaxed and hanging limply. Still steady at 1000 feet, I turned off the autopilot and gave the control stick a slight wiggle—and was quickly rewarded by the corresponding shimmy of the airframe.

Five hundred feet came and went in a blur, with my focus split between the approaching pavement, the airspeed of the plane, and the still limp windsock next to the runway. Four hundred, 300, then 200 feet passed in a similar manner. One hundred feet evaporated into the still, still air under our wings, and I started to think about the nose coming up. At 50 feet I began to actually raise it. The plane helpfully counted off 40, 30, 20, and 10 feet, and then considerately paused as I raised the nose just a bit more to flare before it called out five feet as we settled to the ground—just in time to miss the likely in-air turbulence of the first gusts of wind from the next band of squalls racing out of the Chugach that instead only gently caressed the decelerating plane.

Now, even more hours later, the Princess liner and her wake is no longer below us as we head south, the turbulence of before just a fading memory. The air is calm and the light steady as we bisect the Hecate Strait—the sharp mountain peaks of the mainland to the east and the rolling hills of Haida Gwaii to the west, while the sun continues its gentle downward slide. The steady light softens around us until it is so gauzy that the FO takes down the window shade in the sudden cool dimness of the cockpit.

The clock spins onward and then, in the still air, pointed southward, nautical twilight—the time when both a horizon line and stars are visible—comes to an end and full darkness begins, although at 30,000 feet, definitions blur like the palette of the night firmament above us, as we pass back into US airspace just south of Victoria, BC. Ahead, clouds cling to the peaks of the Olympic Mountains, but the entirety of the Puget Sound is clear. Off the nose, the lighthouse at Port Townsend flickers its pattern of red and white flashes every twenty seconds, while farther in the distance the glow of Seattle permeates the freshly darkened sky. The Controller gives us a descent clearance, and as the FO complies, I reach up and turn on the seat belt sign one last time for the day.