Surf Moon
N41°17.86′ W144°42.19′
0435 ZULU
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.
Out the Captain’s side window the full palette of sunset—orange to red to yellow to light blue to the deepest darkest blue that stretches upwards into the blackness of the arriving night—fills the sky above the horizon. Her seat is currently empty as she’s using a lull between navigation points as an opportunity to stretch and use the bathroom. The flight attendant who is filling in for her up front is busily eating his dinner in the cockpit jumpseat, leaving me an unobstructed view of the lightshow to the west.
We cruise north-eastward into the night, the still invisible coastline of Washington and Oregon sliding ever closer somewhere beyond the curve. The Captain returns and settles back into her seat, momentarily backlit by the fading orange and pink light behind her on the far horizon. The terminator line slides overhead, shrinking our world down to a bubble of blackness lit only by the glow of our cockpit lights, the bright orb of the full moon and the pinpricks of starlight that emerge overhead. The backlighting behind the Captain is replaced with her own blurred reflection in the darkened glass of the side window.
Time ebbs and flows around us as we drift in the stasis of nighttime overwater flying—the radio quiet and the traffic displays empty until suddenly—or so it seems—two hours have passed, and we are following the Columbia River inland, its waters a dark line running between brightly lit riverbanks. We’ve been vectored to the south to fit into the busy late evening arrival bank, and from our current position, the lights of Portland, Oregon are much closer than those of our destination of Seattle. A string of blinking aircraft lights stretches out into the distance ahead of us, descending over the southern Cascades towards the airport. We will eventually be fit in somewhere, but the controller hasn’t shared his plan with us yet so we continue on in darkness.
Finally, after our third turn back and forth, we get headed in the right direction, putting the Columbia River behind our tail. The southern reaches of the Puget Sound spread out ahead of us, a dark stain spreading across the nighttime urban landscape below. High clouds have slid in overhead and the moonlight is diffused across the ground, bathing the areas away from manmade lighting in a soft gauzy wash. The controller hands us off to the next sector and while the Captain checks in on the next frequency, I verify that the approach is correctly loaded into the flight computer.
We track eastward now to join the final approach, our reserved gap in the line of arriving aircraft apparent both on the traffic display screen and out the window ahead. We descend, while below us the land slowly rises towards the invisible mountains ahead, giving me an uncomfortable feeling, and causing me to double check that the terrain overlay is selected on the Captain’s display. The green crosshatching—terrain below our altitude—stretches outward, only turning to the more threatening browns and reds at the very edge of the display, well beyond where we should be turning in towards the airport.
Switching from the virtual world to the real one, I lean forward and press my face against the glass of the windshield. I see nothing more than the ground lighting stretching out ahead of us, fading in and out between ragged patches of low-lying clouds or unlit rural areas. I keep my face there, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness, while at the same time, the lights of the planes already on approach brighten and fill in the darkened sky. I rest my chin on the glareshield and enjoy these last few moments of calm before the business of the approach and landing starts. Staring eastward into the deeper night, faint spots of the palest of golden lights splash across parts of the skyline—light pollution from cities over the horizon—while closer in, the darkened cone of Mount Rainer takes on form from where it sits and watches the stream of arrivals pass it by.
