When flying in an airplane, I love to look out of the window particularly during landing and taking off to see if there is anything I can recognize. I get a thrill in recognizing I-95 or the interchange between I-95 and the Baltimore beltway, or perhaps the Chesapeake bay. Most people are content getting an aisle seat and taking a nap or reading during the flight, whereas I look forward to the take-off and landing along with whatever else I get to see, clouds and daylight permitting. Then again, things are boring if I’m landing in a place I don’t know, or if we’re taking off over countryside. There is nothing I know about Denver, and all farms look alike from the air.
I never flew out of the DC Airport (DCA, although actually in Arlington, Virginia) until my sister moved to St. Louis. While the other airports in the area, Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) and Washington Dulles (IAD) take off far in the suburbs, DCA is in the heart of the city with all the famous monuments. Initially, I would wait for the plane to take off and try to see what I could. With each trip to St. Louis, I began to learn more about the airport and the surroundings. There was only one runway used. If you were lucky, it took off or landed the right way and you could either see the monuments of DC, or the tall buildings of Rosslyn in Virginia. Doing it long enough, I began to trace the plane route all the way until the outskirts of DC metropolitan area. If I do it long enough, I'll probably trace the route until St. Louis!
Having biked to UMD campus for a year, I learnt about the ways in which the winds blow in the area. Encountering a particularly difficult windy day on my bike, I would check weather.com to see what direction the wind was in. Winds were strong in winter, and usually came from the North-West, blowing steadily at a whopping 30-40 km/h. Biking against the wind feels like someone holding your bike from behind preventing it from moving. Biking with the wind allowed me to hit 62 km/h (as measured by my bike speedometer), the only time I violated the speed limit! You could measure the speed of the wind if you were lucky to be moving in the exact same direction. When you hit the wind speed, the air around you is suddenly absolutely still, giving a surreal kind of feeling when you're moving that fast. After the necessary calibration, I became so good that I could do a bike ride and then reel out the temperature, wind direction and wind speed.
Reading up about the weather, I found out that the cold winds came from the Great Lakes in the North west. A north west wind was a precursor to cold weather, while the rare south east wind made things warm, cloudy and a maybe a bit of rain. I came to appreciate what the Himalayas saved the Northern plains of India from.
If there was one thing I learnt from my father being in aeronautics, it was that planes always take off and land against the wind. Wind flow on the wing of the plane provides the necessary lift. If the plane flies with the wind, it gets no lift and will simply fall like a rock. So, if the wind was from the NW at 50 km/h and you needed a wind flow of 300 km/h to take off, taking off against the wind requires you to go from 0 to 250 km/h, while taking off with the wind needs you to go from 0 to 350 km/h. The first flight used a 43 km/h head wind. Other constraints apart, runways are built so that aircraft will most likely take off against the wind. If the wind direction is reversed one day, planes will reverse their direction on the runway for that day. As you might expect, the DCA runway is expectedly built NW - SE parallel to the river. Taking off or landing from the NW gave you a view of the monuments.
When people talk about taking a tour of DC, they usually mean either walking the mall or perhaps driving Pennsylvania Avenue, where you see all the monuments. However, I had the fascination of seeing all the monuments at once from an aerial viewpoint. They look prettier from outside and sometimes even from a distance. Most visitors I’ve taken to DC have been content seeing the monuments from outside. With my fascination for views from the plane, I wanted to have the complete air tour of DC. While that happened early enough, I wanted an encore, but this time with my camera ready. It turned out to be one of those elusive things where I couldn't get everything right. I was on the wrong side of the plane. The plane took off the wrong way. It was night time. It was misty. Some things were easy to fix. I always had my camera with me. I made sure that I was on "row F" while taking off and "row A" while landing, so that if the aircraft did take off or land the right way, I would have the good view. Of course, other things weren't in my control and so I just had to hope that if I did it often enough, I should eventually get everything right.
Finally, it happened. After nearly a year and 6 flights to St. Louis, I was on the right side of the aircraft with the good view. Being October, the winds from the NW had begun, the plane took off in the NW as I would expect, and I was on row F ready with a camera. There was still some mist, but I got things nevertheless. Mission accomplished! When returning from St. Louis that time, I was on the afternoon flight. As with habit, I had chosen Row A. I expected the plane to land from the South East (so that it would be against the NW winds). But as it came near, the flight didn't take the usual path and suddenly it struck me, it was going to land from the NW, it was sunny and clear outside and I was on Row A ready with my camera. It was an absolute treat and rather than describing it, here are the pictures
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| DC Air Pictures |
All that done, we come back to the present, and I hope I've been able to explain myself. As to whether Chitti got the air tour, it turned out that I was right and she got the tour. However, a minute into it, the plane went into the clouds! There are some things you can't predict.
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