It’s All Relative.

It’s midnight in Sydney and 7am in San Francisco.  13 hours of flight time and 6512 nautical miles separate them. The world outside the flight deck is black, void of our friend the moon, who unknowingly illuminates the towering clouds for us to avoid on better nights.

The conversation has gone quiet and we monitor the aircraft and fill out the flight log with very few words being exchanged. The engines hum and a slight wisp can be heard as the airflow licks our windscreen. The stars above hold their position as satellites skip across the sky and space junk flares up as it reenters the atmosphere. Even after decades, it’s still weird to think that this is my office.

Similarly, it still captures my imagination how an aircraft can shrink the planet. As a young pilot flying my first navigation exercises, I would return from a flight and ponder how I had flown from Bankstown to Cowra to Goulburn and back in a matter of hours. 280 nautical miles! It would be a mammoth day in a car and an epic undertaking on horseback in the era of my grandfather.

As my career progressed, the aircraft that I flew became faster and the routes became longer, criss-crossing states and flying coast to coast in the land down under. And now I span oceans and criss cross the planet. In the beginning I looked at a regional chart in awe with my route drawn in pencil with 10-mile markers. Then came the atlas in which I would trace my finger from city to city. And now? It’s the globe that sits upon my cabinet, that I slowly rotate to recall the night before. 

I always knew that I’d fly, looking down at the land below from my magic carpet. What I could not appreciate as a lad was the impact upon me of so many other aspects of flight. The sunrises. The sunsets. The stars and satellites. The clouds, both beautiful and angry. And of course, the distance. Those magic miles that were the measure, joining all of these amazing sights.

And so, I sit at 39,000 feet, at 86 per cent the speed of sound as my dark world slips by. A lone super tanker is no more than a pin-prick of light on the ocean below and I wonder if the crew are looking back at me, a blinking speck in the sky above. Many days at sea remain for them, while my journey will end in hours.

Time or distance. States or oceans. It all still captures my imagination. And it’s all relative.,