As airline-savvy as he and Suzanne seem to be, I was really surprised they weren’t able to score window seats. Of course with SWA’s boarding policy it depends on how quick you can hit the boarding pass button when the seats open up 24 hours ahead of time. (Apparently they weren’t able to get early bird or upgraded boarding)
There’s also not even a window directly at every seat. There’s about four windows per three seats. So although a 737-800 holds about 180 people, that’s ~30 rows of 6 and about 40 windows. Except for a couple spots on the left side ahead of the wing where there are two gaps of about 3-4 feet with no windows at all.
If the eclipse is mostly straight up near zenith you won’t be able to see it. It it’s at a low angle to the horizon, if the pilots are trying to keep up with totality they need to have the eclipse mostly behind the airplane, not broadside to the airplane.
Bottom line: maybe 20 people get a glance at the eclipse at a difficult viewing angle. Everybody else? Bupkiss.
In all a neat idea that doesn’t pan out.
I know people who wanted to do watch it while flying in a hot-air balloon. Someone else said that wouldn’t work because the envelope (fabric part) is so wide & that it would block the view of you looking up at to see totality.
The OP may be interested in this video about the Concorde flight.
I can’t find details so maybe my recollection is way off, but I recall that an SR-71 circumnavigated the earth averaging over 1000MPH so that the entire trip tool only 24 hours. Obviously refueling in flight, but they couldn’t travel in a great circle in order to avoid flying over Soviet territory. Anyone remember this? I saw one comment online that an SR-71 had never circumnavigated the earth. Was it some other type of high speed military aircraft?
ETA: Still finding nothing. Did I just dream this?
ETA: It’s not listed in circumnavigation flight records. Maybe the flight wasn’t non-stop?
Yeah, if you were going to make a serious effort to make an eclipse-watching flight for tourists, you’d have to have a customized plane with a lot more windows, maybe even a full bubble-top. That seems prohibitively expensive (and likely unsafe!) for a plane that would get used at most once every few years.
And if you did do it, it would be expensive enough that those high-end eclipse cruises would probably be more affordable. At least there, you don’t need to completely re-design the ship, and the ship can be used for regular cruises every other day of the year.
There is no need to travel on a great circle to perform a circumnavigation. That’s the shortest route, but not the only route.
Off top of my head, there are many, many great circles that do not intersect Soviet / Russian airspace. I don’t have a globe handy to check and fiddling with Google Earth is an unmanageable PITA at my skill level.
You may be thinking of this. It wasn’t fast, but it was a full circle and then some:
There was also this which was even slower:
Thanks. I’m baffled about this. Late 70s or 80s. There was still a Soviet Union. Yet I can’t find anything close to the event I remember. If there’s anything at all it can’t be the way I remember it.
Like, for example, the equator.
And any that start in the Contiguous US going initially east or west. On the other side of the world, they’ll be over the Indian Ocean, way south of the former USSR.
In fact, there are an infinite number of them.
By that standard there are also an infinite number that do did intersect the Soviet Union.