This is a good time of the year to see this- In my present job it looks pretty much like the video posted, and I’ve also seen an elongated glowing cone form off of the nose of the aircraft, reaching maybe 10 feet out. In my last job in a propeller-driven airplane, I’ve seen the props look like glowing blue discs. In that aircraft when the windscreen would light up, I could ‘play’ with the bolts much like a plasma ball, by touching my fingers to the windscreen.
I am not a pilot, I’m a passenger. I’ve always meant to ask a pilot this, but never really had the opportunity. Once in the early 90’s I was flying East from California over the Rockies and was looking out the window when suddenly a leer jet type plane went zooming by going the other direction. Close enough that I could read the number on the tail. It was slightly lower than us, like 100 feet, but still close. I’ve always wondered, did I witness a near miss, or is that not uncommon?
Airplanes do pass each other, and if you’re looking at the right moment you can see it. Most likely, the airplane was not as near as you though it was (distances can be hard to judge even for pilots). Airplanes moving in different directions are kept vertically separate so that even if they don’t hold altitude exactly there is still ample room for them to pass without danger.
(Yes, you might have seen a near miss, but it is unlikely you did)
As mentioned, trying to judge the distance of a very fast moving target can be tricky. It’s hard to say exactly what happened. Back in the early 90s, assuming you have already reached normal cruising altitude, aircraft are supposed to be separated by at least 2000 feet vertically. (This has been further reduced to 1000 feet nowadays in most cases). The numbers were probably still readable at that distance if you were looking at the right place.
If it was a near miss you’d probably have had a hard time reading anything due to the combined speed. Aircraft at 1000’ and 2000’ can look surprisingly close.
I don’t have photos because the older stuff is on wet film and I’m prohibited from taking photos of the current stuff (and if I did, I wouldn’t be silly enough to post them on the internet for my employer to see.)
[Here is someone else’s photo](http://www.airliners.net/photo/QantasLink-(Eastern-Australia/De-Havilland-Canada/0663518/L/) of the right hand instrument panel. Interestingly, although Pilot141’s machine is a lot faster and bigger, the basic instrument panel is very similar. Note the line of thunderstorms crossing the track at 100 miles. That display is used all the time to try and make the passenger’s ride comfortable and safe.
Notable things I’ve seen.
General weather stuff:
A steady glowing light inside a building thunderstorm. (I don’t know what that was, my best guess is ball lightning, but who knows.)
Plenty of circular rainbows and sundogs.
Something passengers tend not to see is the ice build up on the wing leading edges and windscreens in crap weather.
Lots of thunderstorms including lightning strikes on the water.
Crystal clear blue skies and mountains above a low overcast.
Waterspouts.
The inside of a tropical cyclone.
A single engine Cessna C210 flying out of the bottom of a thunderstorm that was painting big bad magenta on my weather radar, and that my IFR rated arse was going nowhere near.
Today, runway centreline markings appearing out of a tropical downpour as we’re rolling for a low visibility take-off.
Stuff specific to my job as a maritime patrol pilot:
Fishing boat crew’s bared arses as we fly past to take photos, this happens quite frequently.
Blow job action on a yacht as we fly past for photos.
Hundreds of whales breaching in calm seas.
A whale staying stationary with their head down vertically in the water and the tail sticking up like a sail.
Baby whales frolicking.
Blue whales, Manta rays, large sharks, crocodiles and various other sea life.
A long line of hundreds of dolphins over two hundred miles offshore. They were densely packed and spread over a couple of miles, quite amazing.
Other stuff from a previous life:
Skiers falling over as they look up to see us flying down the ski run, inverted.
Spitfire, Kittyhawk, and Polikarpovs in close formation off my wingtip.
I Am Not A Pilot - but a few years back, I was flying from DFW to LAX every other Monday morning. The flight left DFW just before sunrise. I always had a window seat. Out over the desert, I noticed this straight, dark line across the flat desert floor. I was guessing it was a pipeline right-of-way or a big power transmission line or something. It was too straight to be a highway or a railroad and it lined up with the direction we were travelling.
I took me about three flights to realize it was the shadow of the contrail the jet was creating. The sun was coming up almost directly behind us - just off to one side enough to cause the contrail’s shadow to be visible from the left side window.
Way back in my ARMY days I was going away or coming back from leave, I forget but I was in an Martin 202 ? Anyway Southern Airways? The point is that we were going into some place in GA and the cockpit door was open (really long time ago) and I was near the front and had a great view out the front by leaning over a bit. It was very turbulent and it looked like the pilot was hitting the stops with the yoke as fast as he could … He actually made a great landing but it was really fun seeing it from that perspective as I did not know that something that large could rock & roll that fast. All my time had been in small aircraft up till then and I had not gotten my pilots license yet.
Maybe 15 years ago I was traveling West (the never ending sunset), and out the right side of the plane there was this lonely little cloud floating along, and spiking in every direction every few seconds/minutes little bolts of lightning which didn’t extend out more than 20 something feet from the cloud perimeter. Quite literally the most amazing thing I have every witnessed from the passenger seat of a plane.
[hijack]Sequim? Huh. I remember vividly a horrific simulator hop I gave to a couple of hotshots fresh off a WestPac. Their ‘mission’ was to bomb the Hoquiam TACAN station (right by Sequim). Of course, at the apex of their hi-loft, I failed both engines – and since the bomb hit the TACAN pretty much dead center, I killed the station. They recovered from the dual flame-out at about 7000 feet, running on the left engine only. In the time it took them to realize the left generator was fried, but they could run the right one via bleed-air, they sweated quite a bit about just where 8000’+ Mt. Olympus was located. They came within a few miles of some simulated high-speed dirt, but survived to simulate another day. They never asked me to ‘make something up’ again.
[/hijack]
I saw this from the deck of a sailing yacht in the middle of the Atlantic, once. Most amazing animal thing I have ever seen. Of course from water level we couldn’t tell how long the line was.
A guy I know used to fly from Brisbane to Mt Isa regularly, which is mostly over emptiness so I guess the route is very straight. He said that the pilot would quite often announce that if you looked out the left (or right) window right now you would see the flight coming from Mt Isa to Brisbane coming the other way. He said that seeing something closing at 1600km/hr (or whatever) was rather impressive. I imagine pilots would see this more often and have a rather better view.
Back in the Eighties, when there was a rash of commercial airliner near-misses, David Letterman had a Top Ten list that included, “Fly Delta, and enjoy the in-flight movie on other aircraft!”
We actually picked them up on our search radar but disregarded it as a boat, (which is what we’re generally looking for,) however our flight route took us over them anyway and it was quite incredible. Part of our job is to report that sort of thing, so we put them in as 999 dolphins because that’s the maximum number the program we used would take. I really don’t know how many there were, my honest opinion at the time was “more than a thousand” but it’s very difficult to tell with porpoising mammals, just how many there are.
