Our 747-400 was cruising along smoothly at 35,000 feet, late at night over the Indian Ocean. I sat in my seat, staring out the window in awe and amazement as I couldn’t believe what I was able to see. For even though there was no moon and it was a dark night, the sky was ablaze with stars. Out over any ocean late at night without the “lesser light” of the moon governing the night, so many more stars can be seen. And because there are no cities over the ocean to pollute the view of the stars with Earth light, the view of the stars and Milky Way Galaxy were not short of stunning. I felt like I could read my charts in the light of the stars.

When the sky looks like this, constellations are hard to make out because there are so many other stars, that previously couldn’t be seen, that are now clogging the view. I could see Orion out in front of us and the Milky Way was arcing over our heads. The Indian Ocean below us was easy to make out, simply because it was the dark part of the view where the stars ended. The water’s horizon eerily swallowed up the stars out on the edge of the Earth, like a cosmic event horizon. The beauty of the moment was both overwhelming and terrifying, as I thought about the sheer scale and grandeur that is the cosmos above us. Read my blog entry on the Hubble Deep Field (HDF) for some insight into the true scale of the Universe.

As the captain and I sat there mesmerized by the view of the stars, some lights appeared on the horizon. As we drew nearer, they spread out and got larger. In the middle of this huge sea of blackness, a ring of lights became clearly visible. They took on the shape of a rough circle and reminded me of something similar to a scene in the movie Abyss, where lights formed in the ocean as well. Unlike the Abyss, we knew what the lights were: the Island of Réunion. It sits well off the coast of Madagascar and has two large volcanoes rising up out of the center of the island. One volcano is 8,600 feet tall and the other rises over 10,000 feet and tonight, they were unseen in the darkness. Because of the active volcanoes, no one lives in the center of the island, but everyone spreads out by the beach (wouldn’t we all?). That’s why the island, at night, looks like a ring of lights, because the darkness in the middle of the lights is actually very high terrain. There were some low lying clouds that made the islander’s lights glow with an eerie haze. In all this blackness, under all these stars, this strangely lit island, seemingly suspended in space, was quite the view to fly over on our way back to Hong Kong from Johannesburg.

I have never been as far South as Johannesburg, South Africa and I really wasn’t too sure of what to expect. The photo at the top gives you an idea of what I thought it would be like to travel to South Africa’s spot on the globe. Luckily, even though we were way down there, up was still up and down was still down (isn’t this planet cool?). You can click the sideways picture for more photos from my trip. Speaking of cool, our hotel rooms weren’t. I had also forgotten that as one passes south of the Equator, the seasons are opposite to those in the Northern hemisphere. Late November near the Cape of Good Hope is quite warm, as it is nearly summer there. The hotel had problems with its air conditioning and promised it would be fixed by the afternoon. It was still not working when we left the next day. It was okay, because even though it was warm, it wasn’t too bad, as Jo’burg is over 5,550 feet above sea level.

That height above sea level is what causes the flying in and out of that airport to be a bit more of a challenge. The higher one gets above sea level, the thinner the air is. With thinner air, aircraft engines don’t perform as well, as there are fewer air molecules to work with. Our flight into Joburg was uneventful, but on the way out was when the troubles began.

When we arrived at the airport, the temperature was already 85 degrees. We found that the APU (axillary power unit) that runs to provide air conditioning for the plane, was not working. So we went from a warm hotel to a warm aircraft! Inside the cockpit, the temperature read 108 degrees, as the plane had been sitting in the sun for some time. This was an unacceptable situation to load passengers in, so because the APU was out of commission, we’d have to start two of our four engines to do the job of cooling the cabin. As it turned out, one of the three air cycle machines (air conditioners) wasn’t working either! The fueling was being done on the left wing and the cargo was being loaded on the right side, so we couldn’t start any of the engines until one side was clear. Since we were going to board passengers via the ramp with air stairs, we elected to wait until the cargo was finished loading on the right side, so that those two engines could be running while we loaded the passengers on the left side, to try and keep the cabin as cool as possible. So, once the cargo was loaded, we started and then ran the number three and four engines (the right side) for about a half hour to cool the cabin down to something tolerable, like 80 degrees. Air cycle machines only do so much in hot weather, because unlike your car, they compress and then re-expand air to make it cooler, which can only do so much in the high heat.

The plan was to finish boarding, and then push back and start engines one and two. However, just as the last passengers were boarding, the load controller came up and told us we had a problem. They had to remove one container of cargo from the cargo hold. This could only be done with the engines shut down on that side. The captain let out an exasperated sigh, and we came up with the plan to start engines one and two, and then shut down engines three and four while the cargo was unloaded. We had to start engines one and two on the left wing, or the cabin temp would quickly rise again, with 390 people back there.

Finally, we got the all clear and it was time to push back. With all that time spent running engines, we were two hours late and right on the limit of the minimum amount of fuel needed for the long twelve and a half hour flight back to Hong Kong. It was my turn to fly us back and that would give me experience performing a max power takeoff. We took off right at our performance limit, based on temperature, weight, and hight above sea level (over a mile high on the ground in Joburg). Our takeoff weight was 371,000 kg’s, or 818,000 lbs. That’s heavy, even when not departing from a place like this.

The captain stood the power up for takeoff, and all we did was sit still with a huge, roaring rumble behind us. All four Rolls Royce RB211-524 engines, that can produce 60,000 lbs of thrust each, gave us all they had, but we just sat there for a moment. It takes a second or two to get over three quarters of a million pounds moving down a runway. We started to creep forward and the captain called, “Thrust set”. A while later, he called, “80 kts”. There are then two more calls: V1 and Rotate. V1 is called as a point of no return, so to speak. At that speed, we can no longer safely abort the takeoff, so, if after that speed is called, an engine fails, we have to continue and get into the air, or we’ll overrun the end of the runway on an abort. Rotate is called at the speed in which I need to pull back on the yoke and fly us off the runway. The captain called “V1” and I could clearly see the end of the runway coming closer. Closer. CLOSER! After what seemed like an eternity, he called rotate, and we lumbered safely into the air. The numbers say it will work (an abort that is) but even when V1 was called, the far end of the runway was quickly approaching.

At these heavy weights and high altitudes, long takeoffs are normal, however it takes a little nerve and practice to resist the urge to rotate early, prior to it being called by the other pilot, especially when the literal end is near.

It was a nice ride back as we headed out over Madagascar and then seeing the beautiful ring of lights that was Réunion Island, just south of Diego Garcia, North of Kuala Lumpur, over troubled Bangkok, and then into Hong Kong.

You might say a prayer for me as my training days are coming to a close and my line checks (flight evaluations) are quickly approaching. Flying this beast is stressful enough, but being checked on it is even worse! I’ll just have to relax as much as I can during my evaluations, and think back to the beauty that was seen in the night sky over the Indian Ocean. As stressful as this training may be, I am truly blessed to experience these travels over God’s great globe.