Saturday morning broke..0653
Sunny and sweet….
….and then it wasn’t….0806
How to get a day started, in twelve minutes:
…only then came the rain…
by 0818,
as thunder arrived directly overhead,
to avoid the lightning,
we withdrew indoors….
…where Colin was protesting the noise.
He wasn’t as excited as us by all the drama.
The weather front that had appeared as a dark cloud in the northwest, arrived suddenly, travelling at amazing speed.
One could not fail to be exhilarated.
Unless you were a cat. Most of them were under furniture.
Colin just complained.
Not too long after, it had passed on,
…wetting someone else’s hill.
When you work on the front line of a large airline, the weather is something you pay attention to, as bad weather means delays and all the ensuing problems, not to mention cranky passengers.
But even before I worked at airports, I was interested in storms. I loved night flights when I could look down at lightning shows far below. The only time I wasn’t so sure was when the aircraft had to descend through it in order to land. Sometimes it got a bit hairy.
Once, in bad weather over New York, the aircraft I was in was involved in a very near miss. The flight crew, who were quite shaken, told me next day that they had seen the wing tip of the other aircraft. One of them asked if I had been frightened. Of course, I hadn’t known I needed to be, but a colleague in the next seat, who was a pilot himself, kept saying as our ‘plane suddenly climbed dramatically, “it’s going to stall! It’s going to stall!”
I could have done without that.
Those pictures of the time period between 8:06 and 8:12 looked almost like a video. The sky was changing so fast! If we saw a cloud like that where I am, everyone would be running for cover!
That’s what we thought!