Clouds of Purple
N29°6.37′ E175°30.00′
1810 ZULU
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.
We are several hundred miles west of Midway Atoll—a place the FO had to divert to after shutting down an engine on another flight three months ago. We are tracking eastward towards home. Behind our tail, across several hundred more miles of open ocean, Japan is getting drenched by the remnants of a typhoon. Fortunately for us, the eye of the storm had drifted farther east than expected, leaving our way out of Korea mostly clear, and allowing us to climb high enough to be above the weather by the time we encountered it.
My quest for water completed, I idly scroll the moving map on the tablet backwards along our route, tracing the purple line through the swirls of green, yellow, and red radar returns, downloaded five hours ago while still connected to the airport wifi in Incheon. There are rumors we’ll be getting wifi on the airplanes soon, which will allow us to get real time radar updates instead of relying on hours old information. I laugh quietly in the silence of the cockpit, remembering a time that feels like not that long ago when we only had gray scale print-outs of weather that may have been hours old long before they were even put to paper.
The FO hears my laugh and looks over at me. He’s been mostly quiet this crossing, no doubt fighting the pull of drowsiness that so commonly laps around the edges of a nighttime cockpit. Daylight, the great vanquisher of sleep, often arrives just in time to save the… day. I amicably wave away his unasked question and lean forward, feeling the warmth that is now permeating through the glass of the cockpit windows. The air vent by my left knee has been closed for the past few hours, the chill of the subzero air blasting by us and cooling the glass of the windows quite sufficiently keeping the cockpit temperature manageable. Now, I rotate the vent a quarter turn to the right, cracking it open slightly, and am instantly rewarded by a gentle tickle of cold air against the back of my hand.
Outside, the golden glow at the world’s edge has turned into a white-hot line of light. The night sky above has been banished into the future, leaving behind a grayish blue background as the stars fade away one at a time. The ocean’s surface takes on depth and shape in the increasing light revealing isolated purple-tinted cumulus clouds coasting across its expanse. Soon it will be time for the sunshades, and the brightening of the cockpit displays, but in this moment between dark and light, I stare into tomorrow as it rushes towards us to become today.
