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Delta Flight Deviates to See the Eclipse
I believe the deviation over Wyoming and Nebraska for Delta's flight 2466 from Portland to Atlanta was so that both sides of the plane could view the eclipse. There were lots of news articles about this particular flight following the eclipse path. Nice of ATC to allow the deviation! (flightaware.com) Más...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
Three cheers for Delta and the ATC
Doesn't look like a big detour, good for them. Once, I was headed north, descending into Orlando, a great place to watch a Shuttle launch but a bad place to be wandering around, due to traffic volume. I was told that all 188 passengers were pressed against the right hand windows. I gave them lots of advance notice, maybe too much!
It was 1980 and our Squadron had stopped at Whidbey Island, Wa. enroute to a Southwestern training site. We discovered that Seattle Center had authorized a "Mt. Saint Helens departure out of Whidbey. That was most cool! Twelve jets flying a deviation past Mt.Saint Helens a couple years before it blew. We all still had some fun moments back them.
I was a second year graduate geology student and was flying home to Seattle from the University of Illinois on May 18th, 1980. Somewhere over Livingston, Montana, the Captain or FO came on to say our flight plan was going to divert over Pocatello and Portland "to avoid the ashcloud of Mt. St. Helens which is at 65,000 feet in front of us." It was later in the day so we eventually passed southwest of MSH around 7:30pm. I ticked off a Geologist's Bucket List item that day: see a volcano actively in euption.
Thank you, Pete. That was a big memory jogger! So it was more like 1979 when we did that. Memory starts to do its own thing after 4X years!
https://www.fastcompany.com/40456699/heres-what-the-solar-eclipse-looked-like-from-deltas-flight-of-a-lifetime
ATC generally cooperates with these requests. Many years ago (when CH 9 was supported by AA in DC-10), ATC allowed us passengers to get a meandering view of the Grand Canyon and I saw Monument Valley from the air long before I saw it from the ground many decades later. The LAS ATC quip was "... let us know when you have finished your tour."