We start our takeoff run into the setting sun, its bright orange glare diffused across the old, scarred, and grit-blasted windshield of the Cessna 172, all but blinding us. Even with the protection of the darkened lenses of my sunglasses, I squint my eyes almost all the way shut and use the side window to judge our position on the runway. My student in the left seat—a relatively new pilot building flight time—is doing a good job of keeping our nosewheel on the centerline despite the sun’s challenge. I glance at the instrument panel, where the arm on the airspeed indicator is sluggishly spinning to the right, chasing the speed of the second hand on the clock that sits nearby, while out of the corner of my eye, I see the 3000 feet of remaining runway sign slide by...

Silver streaks of moonlight reflect on the waters of the James River below us, as the gear thumps out into the night air. In the darkness off the left wing, ghost ships in the Navy Reserve Fleet swing at their anchors, blocky shadows of gray, endlessly pulled by the currents and tides. I move my attention back inside the cockpit and double-check that we are ready to land. We are making position reports on the common traffic frequency because it’s after-hours at Newport News, Virginia and the tower is closed. However, there won’t be many people listening—today is Thanksgiving and most other airlines stopped their schedules in the early afternoon for the holiday, so it’s just us and the empty boats out here right now...

Rain is pounding on the plexiglass of the windshield and beating against the skin of the airplane, sounding like the cascade of a giant waterfall. I look out the window of the Seminole at the two blades of the left engine’s propeller as they carve circles through the water-filled air, a blur of black against the gray world. The rain is streaming across the side window, single droplets, like slugs, leaving horizontal trails on the plastic that evaporate into the slipstream within fractions of a second...

The door to the briefing room creaks open, and I look up from the computer I am working at and check my watch. Way too little time has passed for my student to have already completed the oral exam portion of his checkride, so something must have happened. I’ve been flight instructing for about 800 hours now, and while I am confident in my ability to teach students, I am still slightly intimidated by some of the examiners. Mike, a long-time Designated Pilot Examiner rolls his chair into the doorway and crooks his finger at me before rolling back out of view. I close the spreadsheet I’ve been entering flight times into and walk into the next room, closing the door behind me, and then lean against its cool surface once it has shut...

The bus’s headlights sweep across my face, briefly illuminating the interior of the cockpit in an orange glow. Behind me, on the other side of the open cockpit door, the flight attendant is busy in the galley putting together the last few things she’ll need to welcome aboard our 50 passengers to Akron, Ohio. Outside, the wind is gusting across the Washington DC ramp, driving raindrops through the darkness, splattering them against the glass of the cockpit windows. I glance up from the maintenance logbook that I am studying in time to see the first of our passengers make a dash from the shelter of the bus and splash across 20 feet of wet ramp, towards the welcoming warmth and light of our main cabin door. Seconds later I feel the plane shudder slightly as they start up the airstairs...

I stand underneath the tail and point my flashlight upwards, highlighting the dark shape of the rudder and elevator. Big raindrops, blown horizontally by a strong north wind, briefly appear in the flashlight’s beam and then disappear back into the darkness, where I can hear them wetly splatter against the side of the fuselage above me. All around me, water droplets drip from the rest of the plane’s surfaces where the rain has collected, but before they can reach the ground, these too are blown away in the wind gusts that rip across the ramp. Beyond the outline of the tail, water vapor—maybe clouds or maybe fog—streams through in illuminated pools cast by the lights mounted on the terminal roof...

We cross over the coastline of Vietnam, seven miles above Da Nang, with a broken layer of clouds ahead of us that are mostly obscuring the dark waters of the South China Sea. It’s just before three in the morning below us, and the minimal ground lighting paints scattered shapes of dull orange light in the clouds. The last of the lightning filled thunderstorms we’ve been weaving our way through since taking off from Thailand several hours ago have now fallen almost one hundred miles back into the night behind our tail, and the half-moon that greeted us as we broke through the layer on our initial climb out has finally sunk behind the western horizon, leaving a sky absent of light beyond a dim wash of stars...

The moon rises out of the haze of the horizon, just minutes after the sun sets. The sky is still an azure shade of blue, and the clouds scattered across the ocean’s surface below us still have enough depth and texture to stand out individually, not yet faded into the gray murk that fills the minutes spanning the indistinct time between day and night. The moon is just hours past full, and even as it sails upward through the haze and the light-distorting thickness of the atmosphere at the horizon, it appears as a perfect sphere bobbing upward from the depths of the sea...

The large cluster of thunder cells to our northwest is punching up out of the Troposphere, their tops towering well over our 39,000 foot cruise altitude. The middle of the storm is sitting directly over Houston, and the airport is reporting 45 mile an hour wind gusts and heavy rain. Despite that, the voice of the high sector controller sounds calm as he hands out weather-based deviations to the multitude of aircraft transiting his airspace. In a moment of radio silence, as I stare out the window at the angry gray mass of clouds in the distance, I realize that his colleagues working the lower level airspace filled with aircraft tiptoeing around the monster storm and actually trying to land in Houston are probably sounding considerably less calm every time they transmit...

When I come back up front from my rest break, I see no light in the sky beyond a wide scattering of stars in the blackness of the cockpit windows. It’s 4am underneath the wings of the plane, but the clocks at our destination, invisible just beyond the curve of the earth, are already showing 5am and the first rays of sunlight are several hundred miles away from hitting those clocks still. I rapidly blink my dry eyes until they tear and then settle into the seat just vacated by the relief officer. Across the cockpit, the Captain pauses from his task of entering weather information into the flight computer and briefs me in on where we are...

We climb out underneath a cobalt blue sky. In the distance, a layer of off-white clouds hangs on the horizon, rolling outwards towards us, while underneath the brown and tan peaks of the Channel Islands rise from a shimmering ocean. I watch the waves break on a solitary strip of sand bounded by cliffs on either side, while the wake of a single boat traces a path through the breakwater. We pass just south of the islands, the California coastline fading away behind our tail, as we push westward against a rising headwind and the rotation of the earth...

We raise the California coast, visible as nothing more than a slim sliver of orange light cutting across a dark horizon, about 90 minutes after we pass out of the day and into the night. As we slide farther eastward through the black sky, pushed by twin columns of jet exhaust flowing from the engines mounted below the wings, I know that the swath of light will expand and take on depth, until it is a patch of color that extends out of sight beyond the horizon, resolving itself into a grid of roadways and buildings, each totally different yet indistinguishable from the next. But for now, the visible arc of the sky is dark save the orange slash and a sprinkling of stars overhead...

The whisky compass—not actually filled with whisky but according to rumor named for the substance that it once used as lubricant—swings back and forth several degrees as the plane rolls in the chop being generated by the strong jet stream core we are passing through. The sky is clear, but this turbulence has been stalking us for the last 100 miles as we’ve crawled across the azure blue expanses. For several seconds, the turbulence fades and the compass settles down and shows a few points to the left of southwest.  Moments later the turbulence starts up and again the compass spins wildly, but the heading indicators on our primary flight displays, pulling data from ring laser gyroscopes—a technology the ancient civilizations who first navigated using the iron needle could only dream of—hold steady, and we continue onward...

A maintenance issue that kept us at the gate for an hour past our scheduled departure time has moved the location at which we will lose the daylight along our route several hundred miles to the west of where it would have occurred if we had left when we were supposed to. From 39,000 feet, the clouds and waves below look about the same at both spots, but now we won’t be seeing the particular waves or clouds at the farther east location as they will slide by us in the darkness. The more material effect of our delay however is that even with a faster cruise speed programmed into the flight computer, we still will be arriving at our destination of Seattle almost an hour late. I glance down at the crisp white letters glowing against the black background of the FMS display screen that shows the current weather there and realize I’m okay with not being on time...

We skim eastward, like a water bug on the surface of a river, the wide and bright blue expanses of the cloud-shrouded Pacific Ocean sliding underneath our wings as if we were the stationary one, not the ocean. Of course in the large machine within which our small metal and composite tube is a mere speck of dust, the ocean is in fact moving too, while the earth spins towards the darkness of night as it constantly falls sunward. Such a complex system is heady stuff to contemplate but can help pass the time out here in the space between where-we-were and where-we-will-be, as the hours slowly tick down towards our arrival...

The all but empty cabin is dim, lit only by a soft blue glow coming from recessed lights overhead and the bright green LED aisle markers on the floor at each seat. Outside of the plane—over the Philippine Sea, several hundred miles to the east of Taipei—it is a sunny two o’clock in the afternoon, but inside the confines of this composite tube of humanity it might as well be two o’clock in the morning. The crew has the temperature turned down and the only sounds beyond the quiet rush of cool air is the periodic rattle of the overhead bins when we hit a patch of chop, and the infrequent hum of human voices from the three flight attendants on the other side of the heavy curtain separating the forward galley from the cabin...

I close the last of the window shades on the right-hand side of the cabin and step into the deserted aft galley. Back here, the vibrations from the engines—still in their climb thrust setting—are rattling the stowed galley carts and Atlas carriers. I run my hand over the numerous bright red latches that hold everything in place. I checked all of these twenty minutes ago, before we pushed back from the gate in the pre-dawn darkness, but a second check to ensure they are locked won’t hurt. On a normal flight there would be several flight attendants back here, now prepping for their first cabin service, but today the plane is empty beyond four pilots and almost 200,000 pounds of Jet A fuel—enough to get us 6,700 miles around the curve of the earth...

Daylight is slowly sliding over the horizon somewhere behind our tail, and even though there is still a slight glare in the view out our front windows, the world has started to take on the bluish tinge that heralds the coming darkness. I reflexively shiver and reach to adjust the air vent by my right knee. The cold air exiting the vent momentarily makes a rushing noise as it blows past my hand and floods into the open space of the cockpit. I rotate the vent closed. The noise—and my shivering—stops...

After almost 400 miles of weaving between towering thunderstorms that are punching into the upper atmosphere above us, we finally break out of the backside of the weather and into clear air. We’ve been picking our way through these storm cells for over an hour—some visible in the haze and some hidden by the scattered layers of clouds we pushed through—and my eyes are tired from constantly staring into the glaring white murk ahead. Aided somewhat by our eyeballs, but mostly by the weather radar in the nose of the plane, we’ve avoided the worst of it, and I’m very happy to be out of the almost constant light turbulence that was rocking the wings...

We are grinding our way westward into a rising wind that is blowing across the islands of Japan and rushing outward over the rapidly darkening waters of the Pacific Ocean, now just barely visible in the pre-dusk murk below us. The captain has been talking for the past 600 miles, while I have split my attention between his story of purchasing a new car and my view of the sun, as it dropped towards the horizon—the light outside the cockpit windows slowly changing from a bright white glare to a subdued bluish-orange glow. We have been chasing after the sun at just over 80% of the speed of sound for almost ten hours now, but despite our best efforts, the sun is finally going to win the race...