Southwest Passage

N37°16.76′ W116°42.60′

0935 ZULU

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.

In order to slip by ahead of the storm, we’ve been routed much farther north than usual. From the latest weather reports and the nonchalant way that Air Traffic Control is vectoring the late-night crowd around the sky, this almost-hurricane doesn’t seem to be much of anything at all. To the south, lightening strobes in the far distance, but even with the cockpit lighting turned all the way down, and my face pressed up to the glass of the side window, it is nothing more than an intermittent blip on the horizon as I stare out into the night.

The route ahead seems clear. The Captain has elected to take the third—and final—break, so the Relief Officer is hanging out in the left seat for the next two hours as we trek across Nevada, New Mexico, and the Texas Panhandle, before starting our descent towards Austin. It’s my leg, but despite that, I take the radio call that comes in from the Oakland Center controller, as across the cockpit from me the RO is finishing the last of his dinner and is mid-chew.

Oakland clears us direct to a fix some 500 miles downrange and hands us off to a Salt Lake Center controller. I punch in the new nav fix and feel the airplane roll slightly to the right. We’ve reached the apex of our northern arc and are finally heading towards Texas. I check in with Salt Lake but it’s 4AM Mountain Time, and it takes three tries before the controller finally answers us with an uninterested readback of our call sign. I shrug it off and go back to splitting my attention between the flight instruments and the light show that has now all but faded on the southern horizon. The RO continues to chew his food.

Time plows onward. Both the RO and I do volunteer union work, and we discuss the relative virtues and intelligence—and sometimes some amount of lack thereof—of our pilot group in starts and stops that do little to fill in the silence of the cockpit. In the same bored-sounding voice, the Salt Lake controller passes us over to Denver Center. The RO is back on radio watch now, but beyond that, not much has changed. With a solid layer of clouds below, our only sense of movement is the painting of stars above us that are slowly rolling up and over our heads as the earth spins on its axis.

Scattered golden patches of ground lighting begin to appear on the horizon… and Denver passes us over to Albuquerque Center. I lean forward and watch those patches slowly slide towards us, the sky taking on a whitish-green tinge as bands of the zodiacal light stream around the curve of the globe. In no time at all, that light on the horizon will begin to turn a faint blue, which will in turn be replaced with a continuously lightening palette of color… that will conclude with the fiery ball of the sun hurling itself skyward to start the new day.

I rub my tired eyes and lean back in my seat, feeling the cool air from the blower vent playing across my face. The printer on the center pedestal makes a humming noise and the latest weather from Austin appears. I tear the page free and read the report—only 5AM there and already 90 degrees with a forecasted high of 109. I lean forward and crank the air vent all the way open, realizing that I should enjoy the cool air while I still can.