East coast elites are wont to scoff at the flat-earthers, but I think they’re on to something. (The flat-earthers, not the elites.)
It was one of those perfect flights. A K9 escorted me through security. (I’m fresh out of bomb juice, so no problems there.) Just prior to boarding, I’m called to the counter. Three quarters expecting a “so sorry, someone’s also got your seat and they’re a better Sky Member than you”, but I was instead given a ticket for a window seat, an upgrade from a center one. Something to do with balancing the plane. The flight attendant’s got some spunk, “WELCOME OUR NEWEST MEMBER OF THE TEAM: PELE. NOT THAT PELE, SORRY, BUT FLAG HIM FOR WHATEVER YOU NEED.” I take them up on this, and by landing time I have consumed triple the qty of Delta’s standard coffee ration. It’s a 7am BOS-DIA flight and the departure is 5-minutes early. The skies are crystal clear cerulean blue, and the snow dusted American landscape slowly unrolls below my vantage in 36A, the city footprints I know from past travels and Google Earth surfing steadily coming in and out of view. Fitchburg, Toronto, Sarnia, Madison, Dubuque, North Platte. My iPhone doesn’t recognize the spelling of Sarnia and this is a shame. It’s good for the eyes to focus on things far away. Flying west is to fly against the direction of the Earth’s rotation, so in a way time is slowing down, on account of the sun not moving as quickly. Flying fast to slow down, if you will. The other paradox being that, as the sun rises at 0.5x, the ground’s shadows become slowly less pronounced, it looks flatter and flatter even as the Rockies grow closer and closer. On descending, the plains appear a solid white plane, the near-distant granite monoliths a jagged, cool dark grey. Pretty flat looking.
“HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY IN DENVER. DON’T FORGET YOUR BAGS AND CHILDREN, WE DON’T WANT THEM EITHER.”
On the other hand, I remember as a kid when the new supertarget opened . . . I was pretty sure that if you stood at one end of the store you could see the curvature of the earth, the store was that big.
You may have experienced what pilots call “flat light” conditions where it becomes difficult to discern the horizon line or judge distances. Flat light conditions are even more insidious than so-called ‘white-out’ conditions where it is clear (no pun intended!) that you cannot see very far. In Alaska such conditions in winter can become severe enough to fool your senses into actually inverting the sky and ground, hence the admonishment to pilots to always “trust your instruments.” :)