Moonrise Over My Shoulder
N14°27.44′ W158°41.72′
1425 ZULU
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.
It’s now just after 2:30am. The two Captains and I assigned to this flight have been going since 4:00pm yesterday—flying five and half hours down to Samoa, and then turning around and coming right back. On the radar display ahead of me, green and yellow swirls start to solidify at the 80 mile range, right about where they were when we passed by here going in the other direction eight hours ago. We’d deviated almost 100 miles out of the way then, using our eyeballs more than the radar to stay clear of the weather. But with visual avoidance no longer an option, I start working the controls of the radar, looking at various projections of the rapidly approaching cells.
The Captain who is flying this leg stares intently at his radar screen for several seconds, before comparing it with mine. He tunelessly hums a few bars of something that I don’t recognize, and then has me request a deviation 15 miles to the right of our course. There is a soft spot in the weather there—for now anyway—and looks to be the best place to punch through. The line itself appears to be only about 15 miles across, but it stretches off both sides of the radar display, negating any chance of a quick deviation around either end. I send the request via data link and it’s quickly approved by a controller sitting 3,500 miles away in Oakland, California.
We drift to the east of our course, still periodically lurching through the invisible bumps. The flight attendants in the back have all been told to sit down, and our passengers are most likely attempting to sleep in the varying comfort of their seats. As the bumps increase, I pull the strap of my lap belt tight and slide my seat forward a few inches, just as a flash of lightning rips through the sky ahead and to our left, momentarily illuminating the knobby exterior of a huge thunderhead. We roll wings level on our new track, still pointed towards the soft spot, although it is now showing angry patches of yellow where before there was nothing but green ones. Seconds later we plunge into the line and the plane twists and pitches like an angry bronco.
The engines roll back as the speed skyrockets upward in the gusty outflow from the storm. Lightning flashes nearly continuously to the northwest and now periodically to the east. The edges of the windshield begin to glow purple as the static electricity builds up across the plane, causing the radios—silent for the past three hours—to chirp and squeal. The radar is still showing nothing too terrifying in front of us, so we press onward into the storm, delicate spiderwebs of electricity now arcing across the glass of the windshields.
Two minutes later we push through the back side line and into the clear skies beyond it, our radar displays now matching the darkness visible out the front windshields. The ride smooths out and the radios return to their silent monitoring of the airwaves. We turn back towards our original route. I cautiously place my forehead against the glass and stare out into the night. In just under two hours, we will start our descent towards landing just as the leading golden edges of daylight chase the barest crescent of a new moon across the arc of the sky. But for now, as I look northward, there is nothing more than the faintest pinpricks of starlight sprinkled across the velvet canvas of blackness.
