# Things Seen from Airline Windows **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 13, 2001, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721 "2001-06-13T21:56:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![John\_Bredin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/96bed5/32.png) [@John\_Bredin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Bredin)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2001, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/21 "2001-06-14T22:56:03Z")
“One of my little things to do is to locate my parents house in the massive urban sprawl that is the Chicago suburbs, complete with cookie cutter subdivisions left and right. Typically I won’t bother trying to figure out what flight path the approach or take off is beforehand and I just try and figure out landmarks to narrow down the location. Its alot like playing a Wheres Waldo game with a time limit that tests you knowledge of the local streets and geography.” I do the same thing, only with the _city_ streets as I come into Midway from the east or south. It’s amazing the detail you can see as you come in. “There’s the Red Line terminal at 95th Street and the dividing of the Dan Ryan Expressway!” “There’s the BNSF rail yards!” Parks, schools, major streets, rail lines, etc… Of course, by the time you cross, say, Pulaski, you feel like you’re going to land in the street or someone’s backyard instead of the airport. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2001, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/22 "2001-06-15T03:49:43Z")
I tried posting this last night, but I got irretrievably dropped just after hitting “Submit.” I see, now, that **berdollos** has asked about Terraserver: Here is the whole swatch of land [from Simi Valley south to the Pacific at 16 meters to the pixel](http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/image.asp?S=16&T=1&X=26&Y=295&Z=11&W=2). Simi Valley is at the top/right of the “reversed question mark” made by highways 23 and 118 in the top/center of the photo. If you can spot the area where you think you saw the dishes, just keep clicking on that section (which will zoom the photo) until you get down to one meter per pixel. Of course, if the dishes were erected after 01 June, 1994, you are SOL since that is the date the photos were taken. ---
**Author:** ![Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e19adc/32.png) [@Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2001, 6:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/23 "2001-06-15T06:57:58Z")
Greenland. Greenland, Greenland, Greenland. Last week I flew from Heathrow to Vancouver direct. At one point half the plane was out of their seats and looking out the right-hand windows to check out mountain ranges covered in snow. Let me phrase that so you actually get the correct mental picture. Take a mountain range. Now dump so much snow on it so that only the peaks and ridges are showing above a flat expanse of white snow, as level as the sea. It was breathtaking. ---
**Author:** ![labradorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3ec8ea/32.png) [@labradorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/labradorian)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2001, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/24 "2001-06-15T14:37:31Z")
- Brion Island and Bird Rocks, with their lighthouses, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off the Maggies; - the islands fringing the Lower North Shore, Harrington Harbour, the Petit Rigolet off of St. Augustine; - following the old Hudson’s Bay Company packet route up the St. Augustine and down the Kenamu into Goose Bay; - the mini-fjords on the south coast of Newfoundland you sometimes get to see on the Halifax-St. John’s run; - spotting landmarks over Montreal (the Mountain, the Big Owe, the oil tanks in the east end) - Mt. Katahdin in Maine on the Montreal-Halifax run. Especially in the coloured season, or with a bit of snow fringing the tip. Wow. - In and out of O’Hare is pretty dang cool. Chicago does seem to go on forever. And they weren’t kidding when the called them things _GREAT_ Lakes, either. Any of you trans-Atlantic types ever photographed northern Labrador on your run? ---
**Author:** ![micco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f8ce5/32.png) [@micco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/micco)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2001, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/25 "2001-06-15T14:58:37Z")
I spend a lot of time looking at scenery and doing geeky things like trying to calculate the altitude by scaling things on the ground, but just to be mildly OT, I’ll list two things _not seen_. On a flight over Nevada on a nice clear day, the pilot indicated we could see parts of Area 51 off the starboard side and proceeded to make jokes about seeing places that don’t exist. I’d bet he was just being chatty since commercial air routes are a long way from any real Air Force facilities, but he had half the passengers standing in the aisle leaning over the other half to look at empty desert. The other time was a _heard_ event. On a night flight in a snowstorm on a little prop plane, the guy next to me was an off-duty pilot. Since I have an Aero Eng background, we started talking about planes. He kept making comments about the background noise (“hear that? that’s ice breaking off the fuselage and being ingested by the engine”, “hear that? that’s the flaps. they sound stuck”). Cocktail please! The worst thing seen from an airline window as a huge belch of flame from an engine of a 737. It was a night flight out of Houston that was just preparing to taxi, so we were still on the ground. They’d dimmed the lights and suddenly the cabin was filled with “daylight”. I had a window seat just aft of the wing, so I had a great view of the plume. It happened twice before they could be convinced to deplane and rebook the flight. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2001, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/26 "2001-06-15T15:21:35Z")
I will never forget flying over the Grand Canyon. As I gazed into it, the music in my mind was playing Bach’s chorale prelude “_Wachet Auf_ (Sleepers Awake)” — or it might have been “A Whiter Shade of Pale” — anyway, it was a near-religious experience. ---
**Author:** ![Spavined\_Gelding](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/958977/32.png) [@Spavined\_Gelding](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spavined_Gelding)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2001, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/27 "2001-06-15T16:39:03Z")
Years ago I was on a flight to Frankfort, Germany. In darkness the flight passed just south of the City of London and then on to cross the French coast shortly afterwards. It was a clear night with no moon. The view was nothing short of spectacular. London was a sheet of yellow light. To use a hackneyed phrase, the French coast looked like a string of diamonds on a dark velvet cloth. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2001, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/28 "2001-06-15T16:40:47Z")
Here’s something I only wish I could see, but the shuttle astronauts have, one piece at a time. [Here](http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html) is a downloadable composite of the entire earth at night, without clouds. You can pick out the little dot of light that represents your city, and easily see where the uninhabited or lower-developed areas are (the North-South Korea border is especially distinct). I have it shrunk down to 1/4 size as my wallpaper. ---
**Author:** ![djbdjb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a87d85/32.png) [@djbdjb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/djbdjb)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2001, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721/29 "2001-06-15T17:43:51Z")
Here are some things I have done: Paid someone to switch and give me the window seat when I could not reserve it ($2, I think). Used the ice and water from my drink to try and clean off the inside of my window. Too often there is junk on the outer window. Try cleaning that! Sent a note up to the pilot asking him to find out what a strange cloud was. I thought it might be a rocket trail from Vandenberg. The flight attendant looked a little uneasy when I asked her to take a note to the cockpit, but I told her to go ahead and read the note, and she took it to the pilots. They replied back. Thanks for all the links. I can’t find the objects I described originally. I should have made my sketch from the plane a little more accurate. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-seen-from-airline-windows/68721.md?page=1)