I was sitting on my shop step late this afternoon watching the hens run around the yard. The sun was shining for the first time in about a week or more, there was no wind, and everything was beautifully quiet.
I heard a strange noise that seemed to come from far away, sort of a thud. Machinery from farms or nearby bridge repairs pass by occasionally, but I didn’t hear a vehicle.
Then I heard a jet, a common enough thing where I live, but when I looked up, instead of seeing a plane flying east to Europe or west to the rest of North America, directly overhead was a plane flying south. I could see the wings glinting at an odd angle, and it looked to be lower than the usual 35,000 or whatever feet above.
Suddenly a contrail was visible as the plane disappeared from view. When I clicked on a flight radar site, there was Delta Airlines Flight 67 from Rome to Atlanta but no longer heading to Atlanta.
The flight track log shows the plane going over our house between 4:08:42 and 4:09:13, and I took the photo at 4:10. Their southwesterly track changed right off North Cape at 4:06 and by the time I saw it four minutes later, it had dropped from 11,582 meters (37,998 feet for you metric/imperial mixed up Gen Xers like me) to 8,854 meters (29,048 feet).
The flight’s destination changed to YHZ and I watched online as the plane went over the Minas Basin, tracked the Avon River headed for Halifax Stanfield International Airport and thankfully landed safely at 3:33. Whatever event caused the redirection seemed to be dealt with quickly, and the plane took off about three hours later and is en route to Atlanta as I write this. The passengers and crew had a long day, but now had a tale to tell of stopping in Nova Scotia. They won’t forget that flight.
If I had been in our house or had my headphones on, I would have missed this little blip in transatlantic transportation, like the farmer in Brueghel‘s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus missed seeing a man who flew too close to the sun hit the water behind him as he was engrossed in plowing his field.
Would it have mattered had I not seen Flight 67? No, not in the great span of time. Is it worth sharing on the internet? Probably not. But I’m glad I shared it anyway. We all have tales to tell, sometimes the same one, just from different perspectives. Every person on that plane will be telling someone of their long day, the sun, the wings glinting as the aircraft turned, the water below.
What did you see today? Who will you tell?
