It is January 25 when I am writing this, and I am on British Airways flight 0103 from London to Calgary, somewhere inland just to the west of the Hudson Bay. This puts me at 11pm London Time, 4pm Mountain Time, and what must be something around 6pm wherever I am.
A departure time of 4:10pm (although we likely were not in the sky until closer to 5pm) put us in a state of just-past-sunset. A fairly empty flight has given most everyone onboard the luxury of spreading out in their own aisles for considerably more comfort. The dark cabin has caused most travellers to fall asleep and I can’t help but wonder how badly this will mess up their sleep cycles when they arrive to a morning rhythm at 7pm.
Whats really confusing me is that we are crossing seven time zones in a span of almost nine hours. This gives me reason to believe that the sky around should be getting slowly darker through the course of the flight. However it is actually getting slightly brighter! While I haven’t solved this riddle, I have come to the conclusion that the flight is scheduled at a time such that the pilots do not fly home facing a blinding sunset the entire flight. Though experiencing a ‘reverse-sunset’ would be rather interesting.
My window seat has treated me thus far to seven hours of a dusk on pause. I sat still long enough to watch two movies (RocknRolla and Star Wars: The Clone Wars), and now its starting to feel weird that I am not engulfed in a midnight darkness. Too bad I can’t watch the NHL all-star game that is presumably near finished now, or fire off emails and IMs on-board. Maybe in a few years…
