Up in the Air

Supper at 7:30 a.m. I’ve been traveling for 15 ½ hours and am somewhere over the icy part of the Pacific. Outside the airplane window the sky is dark. I know my watch is wrong, but in a few more hours it will be right again. I’m traveling through 12 time zones, from Washington, DC to Jakarta, Indonesia.

Going west I am experiencing two consecutive nights with few hours of daylight in between. The plane races the dawn, and the airplane is winning. We’re traveling the Great Arc from Vancouver, Canada, up to Anchorage, Alaska, then down by Kamchatka, Russia, and Seoul, Korea. Only when we angle towards Hong Kong will dawn catch up with us.

Cathay Pacific Airline is flying one of Boeing’s newest planes, a 777-ER. The “extended reach” plane make the 13-hour trip to Hong Kong with a flight crew of four, a cabin crew of 14, and a passenger load of 301 (assuming every seat taken, which seems to be true on this flight).

We have the requisite number of babies who express their discomfort in voices loud enough to hear throughout the Economy Section. I don’ think there are any babies in Business Class.

The Business Class on the Boeing 777-ER itches my envy area. The layout has individual compartments of lounge chairs in angled rows. A person could really sleep there!

In the Economy Section the seats cleverly slide down rather than lean back, so you aren’t bothered by the inconsiderate slob in the row ahead of you. But for Cathay Pacific Airline the seats have been scrunched together in a way that is tolerable only for Asian clientele under the age of 12. The rest of us have our knees jammed into the seats ahead of us. For diversion, however, we have our choice of 100 movies, 350 TV shows, 888 CD’s, 22 radio channels, 70 videos, and innumerable games. I settled down for a slickly satirical newscast from Onion News Network, then viewed a brutally honest episode of HBO’s “The Wire,” and rounded out my viewing with a sweet documentary about Abba and the making of “Mamma Mia.” The rest of the time I listened to my idiosyncratic music mix.

When we crossed the International Dateline we were just 8 hours from Hong Kong, where the local time, we were told, was 25:08. We had lost a day – something we could regain on the trip back.

Our landing in Hong Kong was uneventful, except for the problem that we were a bit late. A freak snowstorm in Vancouver had delayed us for deicing the wings, and we arrived in Hong Kong too late for me and a lot of others to catch our connections. Cathay Pacific service personnel greeted us with tickets already prepared for later flights, and gave us $75 HK in food vouchers and $15 in phone cards. It was all very efficient, except the baggage handling. My suitcase was lost.