Pacific Sunrise.

Somewhere ahead in the Pacific I have a rendezvous with the sun in a most spectacular fashion. I love this place. We are flying at night from Tokyo to Hawaii and are in the latter stages of a long flight. After becoming lighter by burning off fuel, the aircraft has made its final step climb to maximum altitude. We are cruising at 51,000 feet, in the outer reaches of the stratosphere and are now closer to space than any other commercial aircraft can fly. Only 8 millimetres away, through a glass windshield, the atmosphere is almost devoid of oxygen and the temperature is minus 70 degrees Celsius. The aircrafts interior capsule is quiet and warm, comfortably supporting human life. My current world is in the cockpit of a Gulfstream aircraft, 6 CRT screens, spread out before me, are electronically the only indication of my time and space situation. VIP passengers are sound asleep with their own time zones and the flight attendants are also sleeping. The quiet moments of high altitude flight are only disturbed by the, somewhat reassuring, distant rumble of jet engines to the rear of the aircraft, pushing us all through the atmosphere at some 80% of the speed of sound. There are stars around us, but no evidence of the planet below. We are speeding eastbound, at 1200 KM/H towards an invisible eastern horizon. The earths surface below us is also rotating eastward, at 1600 KM/H towards the sun. The twilight zone, a six degree wedge between day and night, is now extending at an angle from the earths surface ahead of us, towards a point in space above and behind us. We are still flying in the black air whereas a few miles ahead, on the other side of this demarcation is the light of day.
It starts brightly as a thin, deep blue strip on a curved horizon, giving a visible reference and proof that the earth is indeed a sphere some sixteen kilometres below. Like a movie in fast motion, blue is joined by indigo, red, yellow and orange as tomorrow races around the earth’s corner to meet us. Twin vapour trails mark our passage, out of the black, through the colour and into the daylight.
“And they all slept through it!”
Colin, our co-pilot, who also loves the dawn, has spoken the first words of our new day.