With Northern Lights on Full Blast, Pilot Circles Plane to Give Passengers a View – CNET [CNET]
To ensure everyone aboard an Easyjet flight from Iceland to Manchester, England, had a glimpse of those dancing northern lights, the pilot took a slight detour, flying the plane in a 360-degree loop.
A number of passengers posted the stunning results to social media.
Passenger Adam Groves, in particular, was delighted with the maneuver.
“An amazing way to top off a special trip where I proposed to my fiancé,” he wrote on Twitter.
EasyJet didn’t immediately respond to a request for confirmation and comment, but the air carrier did retweet Groves’ photos.
Pilots of other flights reportedly performed similar turns to give everyone a view of the charged plasma from the sun colliding with Earth’s magnetic field.
Other flight passengers in the region also caught the lights in full effect.
A NASA astronaut on Tuesday also shared an “absolutely unreal” view of the show from the International Space Station.
The auroral display is the result of Earth-directed coronal mass ejections from the sun over the weekend. The vivid exhibition was one of the best yet of the current solar cycle, which is building toward a peak in intensity some time in the middle of the decade. This means that more opportunities surely await to see the high-flying lights, especially at higher latitudes.