Japan Lights
N35°35.19′ E140°13.42′
0740 ZULU
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.
Looking out over several tens of miles, the cloud tops to the west decrease in altitude, causing the sun—only visible as a ragged line of lava red light in between the layers—to freeze in its descent. The surrounding area darkens with the coming night, causing the contrast between light and dark to increase until it is almost painful to the eyes to look at. Finally, the sun drops below the edge of the earth, bringing the true blackness of night to our vantage point high above the ocean waves.
The darkness doesn’t last for too long, as, in a little while, the eastern coast of Japan slides into view, rolling towards us from the far horizon for our brief pass over that country. Tokyo always shines brightly, its structure and shape defined by the cool white glow of millions and millions of LED bulbs. Tonight, though, a thin layer of scattered clouds below us breaks up our view of the brilliantly lit city, limiting it to the empty spaces between the clouds. Because the jetstream is low today, and the headwind we are facing increases by almost 50 knots in less than five minutes, the combination of our speed and the wind causes the clouds to whip by beneath us, providing an ever-changing light show of the city.
Fearing turbulence, the RO flips on the seatbelt sign. I have the cabin PA selected with the volume turned way down on my radio panel so I only faintly hear the automated announcement play in the cabin followed immediately by our interpreter making the same announcement in Korean. The airline had an incident with turbulence a few days ago, and everybody is understandably hypersensitive about the bumps. I lean forward in my seat, pressing against the leg straps of my seatbelt, while I stare into the now dark sky ahead.
The bumps don’t materialize but the Sea of Japan soon does—a plain of water stretching into the far distance of the night, just slightly darker than the sky above it. To the south, the lights of western Japan twinkle brightly. Unlike Tokyo and the big cities to the east that have all switched over to glare of LED lights that leave a harsh, white tinge in the skies above them, for some reason the transition hasn’t occurred here yet, and the coastline out the left side windows glows a soft orange in the night air. As we continue westward, they too fade out of sight, sliding behind our wing like the other hundreds and hundreds of miles of the globe we’ve already traversed today.
The Captain rejoins us and the crowded cockpit now feels warm, despite the sun having long since escaped us to the west. With three of us up here, and the busy prep work for the upcoming approach and landing in full swing, there is now a sense of purpose again, something that always seems to go missing in the long hours of in-between time. Tokyo Control passes us off to Daegu Control, which is responsible for the eastern half of South Korea’s airspace. They’ve been busy the last few days as their neighbor to the north has been lobbing test missiles eastward into the Sea of Japan. Tonight is quiet though, and they clear us to the initial fix on the arrival into Incheon. I update the flight computer and the plane banks slightly to the right, and finally, for the first time in almost 10 hours of flying, we are pointed towards the end of our day.
