The moon rises out of the haze of the horizon, just minutes after the sun sets. The sky is still an azure shade of blue, and the clouds scattered across the ocean’s surface below us still have enough depth and texture to stand out individually, not yet faded into the gray murk that fills the minutes spanning the indistinct time between day and night. The moon is just hours past full, and even as it sails upward through the haze and the light-distorting thickness of the atmosphere at the horizon, it appears as a perfect sphere bobbing upward from the depths of the sea...

The large cluster of thunder cells to our northwest is punching up out of the Troposphere, their tops towering well over our 39,000 foot cruise altitude. The middle of the storm is sitting directly over Houston, and the airport is reporting 45 mile an hour wind gusts and heavy rain. Despite that, the voice of the high sector controller sounds calm as he hands out weather-based deviations to the multitude of aircraft transiting his airspace. In a moment of radio silence, as I stare out the window at the angry gray mass of clouds in the distance, I realize that his colleagues working the lower level airspace filled with aircraft tiptoeing around the monster storm and actually trying to land in Houston are probably sounding considerably less calm every time they transmit...

When I come back up front from my rest break, I see no light in the sky beyond a wide scattering of stars in the blackness of the cockpit windows. It’s 4am underneath the wings of the plane, but the clocks at our destination, invisible just beyond the curve of the earth, are already showing 5am and the first rays of sunlight are several hundred miles away from hitting those clocks still. I rapidly blink my dry eyes until they tear and then settle into the seat just vacated by the relief officer. Across the cockpit, the Captain pauses from his task of entering weather information into the flight computer and briefs me in on where we are...

We climb out underneath a cobalt blue sky. In the distance, a layer of off-white clouds hangs on the horizon, rolling outwards towards us, while underneath the brown and tan peaks of the Channel Islands rise from a shimmering ocean. I watch the waves break on a solitary strip of sand bounded by cliffs on either side, while the wake of a single boat traces a path through the breakwater. We pass just south of the islands, the California coastline fading away behind our tail, as we push westward against a rising headwind and the rotation of the earth...

We raise the California coast, visible as nothing more than a slim sliver of orange light cutting across a dark horizon, about 90 minutes after we pass out of the day and into the night. As we slide farther eastward through the black sky, pushed by twin columns of jet exhaust flowing from the engines mounted below the wings, I know that the swath of light will expand and take on depth, until it is a patch of color that extends out of sight beyond the horizon, resolving itself into a grid of roadways and buildings, each totally different yet indistinguishable from the next. But for now, the visible arc of the sky is dark save the orange slash and a sprinkling of stars overhead...

The whisky compass—not actually filled with whisky but according to rumor named for the substance that it once used as lubricant—swings back and forth several degrees as the plane rolls in the chop being generated by the strong jet stream core we are passing through. The sky is clear, but this turbulence has been stalking us for the last 100 miles as we’ve crawled across the azure blue expanses. For several seconds, the turbulence fades and the compass settles down and shows a few points to the left of southwest.  Moments later the turbulence starts up and again the compass spins wildly, but the heading indicators on our primary flight displays, pulling data from ring laser gyroscopes—a technology the ancient civilizations who first navigated using the iron needle could only dream of—hold steady, and we continue onward...

A maintenance issue that kept us at the gate for an hour past our scheduled departure time has moved the location at which we will lose the daylight along our route several hundred miles to the west of where it would have occurred if we had left when we were supposed to. From 39,000 feet, the clouds and waves below look about the same at both spots, but now we won’t be seeing the particular waves or clouds at the farther east location as they will slide by us in the darkness. The more material effect of our delay however is that even with a faster cruise speed programmed into the flight computer, we still will be arriving at our destination of Seattle almost an hour late. I glance down at the crisp white letters glowing against the black background of the FMS display screen that shows the current weather there and realize I’m okay with not being on time...

We skim eastward, like a water bug on the surface of a river, the wide and bright blue expanses of the cloud-shrouded Pacific Ocean sliding underneath our wings as if we were the stationary one, not the ocean. Of course in the large machine within which our small metal and composite tube is a mere speck of dust, the ocean is in fact moving too, while the earth spins towards the darkness of night as it constantly falls sunward. Such a complex system is heady stuff to contemplate but can help pass the time out here in the space between where-we-were and where-we-will-be, as the hours slowly tick down towards our arrival...

The all but empty cabin is dim, lit only by a soft blue glow coming from recessed lights overhead and the bright green LED aisle markers on the floor at each seat. Outside of the plane—over the Philippine Sea, several hundred miles to the east of Taipei—it is a sunny two o’clock in the afternoon, but inside the confines of this composite tube of humanity it might as well be two o’clock in the morning. The crew has the temperature turned down and the only sounds beyond the quiet rush of cool air is the periodic rattle of the overhead bins when we hit a patch of chop, and the infrequent hum of human voices from the three flight attendants on the other side of the heavy curtain separating the forward galley from the cabin...

I close the last of the window shades on the right-hand side of the cabin and step into the deserted aft galley. Back here, the vibrations from the engines—still in their climb thrust setting—are rattling the stowed galley carts and Atlas carriers. I run my hand over the numerous bright red latches that hold everything in place. I checked all of these twenty minutes ago, before we pushed back from the gate in the pre-dawn darkness, but a second check to ensure they are locked won’t hurt. On a normal flight there would be several flight attendants back here, now prepping for their first cabin service, but today the plane is empty beyond four pilots and almost 200,000 pounds of Jet A fuel—enough to get us 6,700 miles around the curve of the earth...

Daylight is slowly sliding over the horizon somewhere behind our tail, and even though there is still a slight glare in the view out our front windows, the world has started to take on the bluish tinge that heralds the coming darkness. I reflexively shiver and reach to adjust the air vent by my right knee. The cold air exiting the vent momentarily makes a rushing noise as it blows past my hand and floods into the open space of the cockpit. I rotate the vent closed. The noise—and my shivering—stops...

After almost 400 miles of weaving between towering thunderstorms that are punching into the upper atmosphere above us, we finally break out of the backside of the weather and into clear air. We’ve been picking our way through these storm cells for over an hour—some visible in the haze and some hidden by the scattered layers of clouds we pushed through—and my eyes are tired from constantly staring into the glaring white murk ahead. Aided somewhat by our eyeballs, but mostly by the weather radar in the nose of the plane, we’ve avoided the worst of it, and I’m very happy to be out of the almost constant light turbulence that was rocking the wings...

We are grinding our way westward into a rising wind that is blowing across the islands of Japan and rushing outward over the rapidly darkening waters of the Pacific Ocean, now just barely visible in the pre-dusk murk below us. The captain has been talking for the past 600 miles, while I have split my attention between his story of purchasing a new car and my view of the sun, as it dropped towards the horizon—the light outside the cockpit windows slowly changing from a bright white glare to a subdued bluish-orange glow. We have been chasing after the sun at just over 80% of the speed of sound for almost ten hours now, but despite our best efforts, the sun is finally going to win the race...

The airplane’s nose is tracking just a few points off due east through the cold, clear air. Several hours earlier while I was on break and trying my best to get some sleep in the back, for just over 300 miles, we rode the core of a jet stream. While I tossed and turned in a less than comfortable lay-flat seat, the captain flying the plane pushed the power up slightly to—assisted by 200 knots of wind whistling around the curves of the earth—break his personal ground speed record and fly at just over 800 miles per hour over the unseen waters of the northern Pacific some 39,000 feet below...

The double-paned window is cold to the touch and the back of my hand leaves behind a smudge of condensation when I pull it away from the glass. I watch the moisture fade, evaporating into the relatively warmer air of my hotel room, as finally, I begin to feel the stress of the last few hours of flying lift from my shoulders. I spin the padded office chair I’m sitting in around to face the room, and then stand up and roll my shoulders several times. The spot that has been bothering me behind my right shoulder blade pops, the noise jarringly loud in the empty space, and I grunt with satisfaction...

I blink rapidly as I step into the light-filled cockpit, after the darkness of the business class cabin. The Relief Officer, who has spent the last four hours, along with the Relief Captain, navigating us westward while the captain and I were on our rest break, slides past me and steps out of the cockpit. Still squinting slightly, I sit down in the empty right seat. While I click my seatbelt into place and adjust the seat position, the Relief Captain, who is still flying the plane, briefs me on where we are and what’s been happening, and hands control of the plane over to me. He then unclicks his seatbelt, gives up his seat to the captain, and moves to the jump seat, where he will remain for the rest of the flight..

We track eastward underneath a darkening sky that arches high overhead, cascading downward like a dome, its bottom edges holding the dull orange glow of the just set sun. The moon, mere hours from the fullest point of its 29 day cycle, has been sliding upwards from the fuzzy terminator line of earth and sky for the last hour, a bright white marble against the deepening blue of the heavens...

We seemingly hang in a deep azure blue sky, swimming slowly upstream against a river of wind that continually circles the globe in meandering arcs. This Jetstream wanders, sometimes to the north, then south, then north again, but is always moving eastward, driven by the complex mechanics of planetary rotation. I close my eyes, the bright sun warm on my face, and try to build a mental visualization of the airflow around our blue marble, but quickly realize that I can’t hold the complexity in my head...