If you’re from Colorado or British Columbia, or even next-door Vermont, frankly, then Mount Greylock is not going to impress you. Thankfully the skies ahead over New England appear to be as spotless as those over New York.Ībout a quarter of an hour after takeoff, as we are climbing through the high twenty thousands, I get my first glimpse of Mount Greylock. As we retract the flaps, we’re given a series of left-hand turns that bring us (the long way) around to our initial northwesterly routing. Just under an hour later, we depart from 31L. “Then let’s hope it’s just as clear up north,” he says with a smile. I tell the captain about the unusually personal resonance of what’s been loaded into the electronic depths of the flight management computer. A more typical figure for much of the climb would be 3.0, or even lower, numbers that reflect our typical flight paths over the diminutive elevations of Long Island, southeastern New England, and, of course, the ocean itself. The highest figure on our paperwork today is ’4.8′, or 4,800 feet. The first clue is the Minimum Safe Altitude in the first half an hour after takeoff. Still, something is different about this flight. A quick scan of my logbook says I’ve crossed the skies between these two world capitals about 120 times so far in my career. If so, I’m a fairly busy driver of the buses that connect them. There’s a joke that in this day and age New York and London are each merely neighborhoods of the other. Indeed, KFJK and EGLL are the airports that I’ve flown between most often. So far, at least, there’s nothing unusual. I carefully lower my generously-sized coffee into that signature Boeing cup holder and start to program a route to London’s Heathrow Airport. ![]() With a larger-than-usual smile on my face, I take my seat on the flight deck of a 747 at Kennedy Airport. It’s a bright spring morning, fine and clear, the kind of day that planes (and pilots) were made for.
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