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...

As we start descent, the sun begins its final drop towards the horizon, projecting hues of orange and gold on the undersides of the clouds high above us. Below, visible through a scattered layer, the windswept ocean’s surface is a deep but fading blue, marred only by the claw-like slash of white-capped waves. Despite the tumult down there, our past eight hours of sliding westward over the Pacific have been mostly smooth and I fight to break through the kind of fatigue that can build up under the weight of an afternoon that seems to stretch into the forever of backwards-moving time zones...

Storm clouds flicker low and ahead of us, a dark mass periodically pulsing with electric-blue streaks, breaking the desaturated palette of post-sunset colors smoothly stretching across the horizon. From my position on the jumpseat at the back of the cockpit—I’m working as the Relief Officer, the RO, on this trip—I can only see below us by looking out the side windows, although as of now there is nothing to see anyway beyond the pre-darkness murk of ocean and clouds. The Captain and FO are working through the plan for the upcoming approach and landing, periodically trailing off from their discussions, and in the long pauses, staring ahead towards the last embers of the day or fiddling with the distance and tilt knobs of the radar, trying to geographically locate the storms ahead within our flight path...

I return from break just as we cross over Interstate 5, visible between ragged gaps in the cloud layer far below us. The ride has been smooth for the past few hours, and as I settle into my seat and fasten the bottom three straps of the five point harness, I watch as the scattered stream of headlights—probably mostly made up of trucks—after all, it’s 3AM on the ground below us—trundle northward ahead of the diminishing eye of a rare West Coast tropical storm...

Thousands of feet beneath our belly, a textured layer of clouds floats in the fading light like a quilted sheet. The ride has been smooth since we made our climb to 40,000 feet two hours ago and left below us the unstable winds and swirling air mass that had been buffeting the airframe since we coasted out. A maintenance delay early this morning had caused the plane to get behind schedule, leaving us with only 40 minutes between its previous trip’s landing in Honolulu and our scheduled departure. With that in mind, pushing back on the rain-dampened ramp only 20 minutes late had felt like a victory...

The weather starts deteriorating three hundred miles north of the equator. It’s still two hours before moonrise—and that moon will be no more than a sliver anyways. Even with the cockpit overhead light turned off and the display screens dimmed down all the way, I can see nothing beyond a faint speckling of stars when I press my forehead to the inside of the windshield and stare out into the darkness on the other side. The plane jolts slightly and my head bumps against the glass. I sink back into the lumpy sheepskin padding of my seat and sigh heavily as the edges of exhaustion from the all-night trip wash over me...

Oakland Oceanic has taken pity on us after our fourth consecutive request for a weather deviation. We’ve been progressively asking for 20 mile deviations to the right of our route—via the warbly blips of the HF radio as our SATCOM datalink is out—to sneak around the western end of a massive thunderstorm just north of the equator. From 100 miles away it looked like just the initial 20 miles would do, but as we slipped southwestward, with the dark gray mass of swirling clouds still filling the view ahead out the windshield, it became readily apparent that 20 miles, in fact, wouldn’t do it. Nor would 40 miles or even 60. When I asked for 80 miles a few minutes later there was several minutes of silence on the frequency, filled in only by the constant analog blips of static on the HF radio. “Cleared to deviate up to 150 miles right of route,” says the controller. And then after a pause, “Hopefully that will be enough for you..."

The world is a million shades of blue. I lean back in my seat, relaxed by the transition that is the hot light of day to the calm blues of dusk. The air coming out the gasper vent by my knee is now noticeably cold. When I cranked the vent full open just prior to takeoff three hours ago, it was fighting a losing battle with the heat of the day, but now I close it as the cooling is no longer needed. Outside, the last bright rays of sunlight have spent the past twenty minutes turning the western sky into a fingerpainting of oranges, yellows, and golds, but with a final turn of the earth, the sky embraces the dull, desaturated wash that darkens as it spreads upwards...

The long tentacle of the Milky Way flops lazily over the equator, reaching up into northeastern skies above us as we cruise towards home. The Japan coastline, along with its heavy rain showers that are driving blooming cherry blossoms to the ground, has dropped over the horizon behind us, leaving nothing more than the memory of the light. In our newfound darkness, thousands of stars, some well-defined but most nothing more than scattered grains of sand across a black canvas, flare across the night sky...

We track southwards in a puddle of dim orange light that permeates the solid layer of clouds just below us. The sun dropped below this layer several minutes ago, leaving behind a de-saturated gray sky rapidly embracing the night. This light seems to lap around the edges of the plane however, spreading outward across the tops of the clouds, moving along with us until it fades and eventually vanishes in the near distance. For several miles I stare out the glass and wonder where the orange glow is coming from before finally realizing what the light show is—courtesy of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher who died almost 2500 years ago...

The sun sets thirty minutes before we cross the coastline, the sky burning down towards the horizon, leaving nothing more than charred blues and blacks behind. As I dim the interior display lighting and screens, the last gasps of daylight flicker in the far distance, providing a final illumination of the broken layers of clouds below us, and the darkened patches of the Pacific Ocean below them. The Captain is currently on break, leaving the Relief Officer and me to watch the spectacle unfold outside the windows...

Raindrops fall discontentedly from a leaden, late Fall sky, staining the pavement a darker shade of urban bland. Traffic sounds are muted. The willow trees at the edge of the Public Garden’s pond drip water into the dirt below, while somewhere down Beacon Street the two-tone banshee wail of a city ambulance echoes through the man-made canyons before it fades away into the wet, cold air...

Three hundred miles from Sydney, the daylight finally pulls away from us and drops over the western curve of the Earth. For the past thirty minutes, shimmering pools of light have danced across the scattered cloud tops far below us. Driven by ocean currents, these clouds formed sweeping bands and swirling vortexes that have stretched out into the fuzzy distance. Now, with the world darkening overhead and the clouds and water losing definition below, the horizon desaturates from a bright palette of orange, red, and gold, to a band of gray and white, with the faintest strands of pink and yellow stretched thinly across the sky’s bulk...

0402 ZULU

White flashes of lightning strobe low in the distance as we approach the coast, while the pale-yellow wash of ground lighting begins to warm the horizon line. I lean forward in the darkness of the cockpit, watching the lights of the Bay Area roll closer and closer, taking on definition as they do. With the bright light of day having slid well behind our tail, the cockpit has become chilly so I spin closed the air vent on the panel in front of me while imagining the heat of the approaching lights. Another thirty minutes of flying time and we’ll be opening the cockpit door to the fading warmth of a California night...

The perfect sphere of the full Harvest Moon surfs the crest of the terminator line, an ocean full of clouds fading at its feet in the diming light.  We’ve been heading east for just over three hours and the flight computer is showing another two more to go, but they’ll be completed in darkness on this late summer evening. It’s my first trip in over a month due to vacation and Union work—and my first short haul in almost a year—the five-hour flight time being relatively quick compared to the heavy crewed, ten-to-twelve-hour trips I normally fly. Despite all of that, the rust has come off quickly, and in the cooling darkness of the cockpit, I lean back in my seat and stretch my arms upward towards the overhead panel...

A pre-daybreak glow clings to the horizon line like a puddle of liquid gold, expanding outwards as it pours upward from a still invisible sun. My throat is scratchy from breathing hours of cold, filtered air and in the dim light that now fills the cockpit, I reach for the water bottle sitting to my left. As the RO on this trip, I am currently seat filling for the captain and it takes me a moment of fumbling around the unfamiliar environs of the left seat to find the bottle. Across the cockpit, the FO stretches and then leans forward, a faint orange hue washing over his face...

The day finally ends, just as we reach the coastline. Sunset began almost 500 miles ago, somewhere over the Pacific, but we’ve been tracking steadily northeast for the crossing, and that, coupled with the summer tilt of Earth’s path around the sun, has kept the last rays of daylight still visible for several hours. I had first break today, and after almost three hours of movie watching, I came back up to a cockpit still filled with the softening light of day. I ate my dinner as the light continued to weaken, until we finally passed under the terminator line and into the coming night. Now with the world in all but full darkness, low clouds on the distant northern horizon appear as pale wraiths in a pool of dim blue that shimmers and fades into nothingness...

We lost the last of the daylight just as the latitude readout clicked down to zero, with nighttime equatorial thunderstorms firing up along the fresh black line of the horizon. During the hour prior to that, the sun’s last rays wrapped themselves around the curve of the earth, fading westward like a receding tide, the reds and oranges losing their luminance and luster with each passing minute. The last moments of the day were a curtain of black, star-flecked sky above a faint orange glow so hard to see that even after blinking repeatedly in the soft and comfortable darkness of the cockpit, I wasn’t sure if it was still there, or just a memory of things seen...

We climb skyward in the velvety smoothness of a Southern California dusk. The plane rockets upwards, away from a darkened ground splashed with the first lights of evening, while in the cockpit, the altitude tape rolls across the side of the primary flight display in a blur of digits. The plane is lightly loaded and after being away from base for eight days the plane feels eager to be heading home. We pass underneath the arrival corridor for LAX. The landing lights of the inbound aircraft, forming a string of pearls rising into the darkness of the eastern skyline, drift by above us. And then we are given a turn to the west...

Below us in the darkness, the eastern half of Japan breaks free from the cloud layer like an old-school movie monster emerging from the sea with tendrils of mist running down the back of its mountainous spine. Freed from their opaque covering, the urban lights of Tokyo burn furiously in the distance, radiating upwards into the night sky… a glow so massive that it seems to fill in the slight, visible curve of the earth. The cockpit has finally warmed up—the last of the cold, damp Korean air purged out into the night—and I lean forward with my chin resting on the top of the glare shield watching as the starry night sky fades to dull, empty black in the face of the oncoming city lights...