A Texan in Tibet - Paris to Colombo Sri Lanka

Green Line in the Sand

 

Another uneventful flight, but my eyebrows raised for a moment. Most airlines have the video displays that passengers can play with to view the end-to-end flight path from various angles. My A.D.D. brain loves shiny things and buttons, and this is like a big shiny button customized just for me. I was scanning the screen for something interesting and our route caught my eye. After the flight left Paris and started heading towards the middle east, I noticed the projected flight path was southward, right through the middle of Iran as illustrated in the green line below the jet icon. My butt finally unpuckered when I felt the aircraft bank hard right and then saw it on the display. Not today Khomeini!

I switched my GPS tracker interval to two minutes to capture our actual flight path as accurately as possible. Our pilot chugged the Iraq side of the line all the way down before heading east again at Abu Dhabi. Those yellow dots represent about two hours that I spent staring at my GPS tracker's route on my phone waiting for our plane to reach the Gulf of Oman.

As I type, it's 6:20am in Colombo; 7:05pm the night before at home. I've been awake 37 hours straight. I have about two hours left to kill here before my four-hour flight to Kathmandu. I needed to stay awake and get on local time. There was no sleeping on my final flight segment to Kathmandu. The plane was stuffed full and oversold passengers were turned away. The space between rows was smaller than any I've seen on any flight. My knees were crammed against the tray to the point that I couldn't even lower it. I'm just thankful I wasn't in the middle seat!