Why I Like The Window Seat

The other day I talked about flying and mentioned that while I prefer the left-hand seat in the very, VERY first row, when flying commercially I always try to get a window seat.

From our trip last week from Norfolk (ORF) to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), when there was some significant storm activity across the Appalachian Mountains, with some BIG thunderstorm cells popping up over Kentucky and Tennessee.

After we got to DFW I looked up this image from FlightAware.com. The green line is our flight track. Pay attention to that big red blob on the radar just north of the Alabama line, about a hundred miles southwest of Nashville.

Flying southwestward from ORF to DFW:

This storm front went from Florida to New York and was causing flash flooding throughout central Virginia and into DC. It was “exciting” (i.e., bumpy & turbulent) climbing through it. (I love “exciting” flying, Ronnie not so much – one of the reasons that she’s The Long Suffering Wife.)

Can you see the southbound jet (bright white dot) right above center in the gap between the two lines of clouds? He was probably 10K feet below us and descending, possibly into Atlanta.

Sometimes with a lot of clouds & showers around an a late afternoon sun and the right course, you can get lucky and see a rainbow in a shower below you.

Way over on the right, we start to see that really big thunderhead over Tennessee, climbing through the altitude that all of the other thunderheads were topping out at and building its signature anvil shape much higher, maybe at 50,000 feet or more. That’s a lot of energy, that’s a lot of danger. We were kept a long way away from it for a reason.

A second rainbow spotted today.

Here you can clearly see how much higher that one convection cell rises compared to all of the other activity in the area.

Off in the middle distance, just to the left of that monster supercell, a third rainbow of the day from a small cell that’s dumping a shower over northwest Tennessee.

And THAT‘s why I like having a window seat!! It may not be low earth orbit, but it’s probably as close as I’m going to get this year. (As always, I’m more than willing to talk any time to any one who can prove me wrong on that last point.)