Mark's Pages

February 18, 2003:

757, window seat, left side, last row at the far back. The tail is so much higher than the wings that it's like looking down from a multistory building. Seatbelts buckled, trays upright and locked. Chit-chat of the cabin crew in their stow-seats behind you. BWI airport surrounded by fast-moving thunderheads.

Roar of engines. Plane as powerful as rockets. G-forces: the sheer brutality of an airframe hurled skyward by massive acceleration, the engine roar like a protest of physical improbability. Off the runway, steep climb, wheels up and locked.

Your heart stops. Massive bank right: pilot stands it on the wingtip. Out the window you're looking down the wing straight at the ground. At full throttle we whipshot around an ugly thunderhead, heavy-looking, threatening. Level-off fast as dogfighting, then massive bank left, and you're looking down the other wing straight at the ground as we whipshot around a second ugly thunderhead. Level-off, then climb near-vertical, like a rocket to the moon. The most radical maneuvers you've ever experienced on a commercial airliner.

You turn around to the cabin crew in their stow-seats behind you.

"Wow," you say, eyebrows raised. "Gnarly."

A flight attendant laughs. "Yeah," she agrees. "We only usually get to do that with an empty plane."

All the way home there are lightning flashes inside huge thunderclouds below. Over Chicago the front opens, revealing the city like looking through a hole in ice. Your last image is of the opening shrinking toward the center, electrical explosions on all sides, deep within the cloudmass.