Blizza Blizza

Probably everyone who reads this blog regularly — all three of you — has done a fair bit of flying and has some idea of the shockingly different perspective a person can have on the world from 30-odd thousand feet above it. I’ve been a pilot since 2004, I’ve flown as a passenger literally around the globe, and I’ve spent something like 2500 hours of my life in airplanes so far.

It was a clear night tonight up at 37,000 feet in cruise from Dallas-Ft. Worth to Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi, and the Milky Way was very clear and bright. I love night flights over fairly dark terrain (open water is even better) because it almost feels like you could reach out and touch the stars.

As we began our initial descent into Biloxi, we crossed over I-55 at about 33,000 feet. At first, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at, but then it dawned on me: as Hurricane Gustav bears down on Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, as mandatory evacuations have been ordered for all of New Orleans to avoid a repeat of Katrina, the entire interstate had become one solid bumper-to-bumper mass of headlights streaming north to safety.

I’m going to hop in the same airplane at 0700 tomorrow, fire up the engines, and blast off to Dallas, where I’ll have a two-hour break and eat some breakfast before going to Cincinnati. Monday morning, I’ll get up, fly back to Chicago, do an Albany (NY) turn, then fly home to Kalamazoo. Meanwhile, those thousands upon thousands of headlights will still be marching north, to wait for who knows how long. I hope when they turn around and head back home, they’ll have homes to head back to.