UK Arrival - Cheltenham, Sep. 2

Is there an award for lasting a 9 hour flight without going to the bathroom on board? If so, someone owes me a medal.

Nothing too exciting happened on the flight, which is probably a good thing. The seats had screens built-in with a tethered remote control, the back of which had gamepad inputs! There were actually games available to play in flight, that's something I've never seen before! I played a few rounds of Tetris to pass the time.

I recently bought a pair of ANC headphones, which made a huge difference for the flight. It's amazing how much sound is cut out by these, definitely worthwhile. Specifically, I bought the Surface Headphones 2, which have really good ANC and pretty good audio quality (have to play with the equalizer a bit, the lows and highs need to be amplified a bit). They also pair with multiple devices really well, and can seamlessly switch audio sources. I also really like how each ear cup has a rotary wheel for volume and ANC amplitude, though I do wish they had mechanical end stops rather than just encoders without physical limits.

My biggest complaint about these headphones is the ear fitment. The cushions aren't deep enough, so my ears were constantly pressed against the speakers, making my ears sore after a while. On top of that, the bottom of the cushions didn't seal very well to my head, so some low frequency rumble still made its way through. Might be able to fix both of those problems with some aftermarket cushions, will have to look around.

I did manage to sleep for a couple hours or so, but got woken up by a flight attendant checking whether my seatbelt was on. Couldn't fall asleep after that, oh well. That might have actually helped me with the time zone adjustment, so there's a silver lining.

​I also managed to catch the sunrise in the wee hours. I imagine that must have been great for the pilots since the plane was going directly east. Makes me wonder how they deal with that...

As we came in over England, it was overcast (typical England!) and I noticed the clouds had wavy patterns in certain areas. After a quick Google, I believe these are called undulatus clouds, though I'm not a meteorologist. My guess is that they're somehow caused by the wind moving over some hill on the ground, and causes repeating regions of high and low pressure, and thus repeating clouds. I'm not certain about this explanation, but since I couldn't find one, I made my own!

Even more interesting is seeing the plane's shadow on the clouds below. Or rather, just outside the plane's shadow. This is something I've noticed before on other flights, where there appears to be a faint ring around the shadow, and it appears to have a rainbow gradient. This is the best photo I could get, the plane was turning and I didn't have time to change camera settings. You may have to squint to see the ring more clearly, it can be hard to pick out.

Since I'm not even sure how to Google for this one, more speculation time! From looking at the ring, it appears the outside of it is red and the inside is blue, which is exactly what normal rainbows do. Normal rainbows are caused by light refracting through rain drops (simplifying a bit here), where the refraction angle depends on wavelength. Something similar seems to be happening here. I've only ever seen this effect when the shadow hits a cloud, which indicates to me that the cloud is necessary, and thus the tiny water droplets in the cloud are causing the light to refract.

In a normal rainbow, the light first reflects once off the back of the rain drops before exiting again. It just so happens that the angle between the incoming and outgoing visible light is about 42 degrees, which is why normal rainbows appear so large. I'd bet the effect seen above is caused by 2 reflections off the back surface, resulting in an angle much closer to 90 degrees (or 0 degrees, depending on how you think of it). I don't think the angle of a double reflection is twice that of a single reflection, but 84 degrees (or 6) actually seems like a reasonable estimate.

Anyways, enough about clouds. After landing, getting through the airport was surprisingly easy. Rather than talking to a security officer to get through border control, an automated machine scanned my passport and face, then let me right on through. Didn't have to talk to anyone, or even show my Passenger Locator Form to anyone at any point (even though they make a big deal about filling it out).

After a 2 hour car ride to my grandparents' house, I was finally done travelling! It was nice to sit down in a comfy chair and be with family for a while. Sounds like we'll be visiting Cooper Hill tomorrow, better known as the cheese wheel hill. If you're not aware, people race a cheese wheel down a hill. It's worth a Google!

That's pretty much it for today. I managed to stay up until 10pm local time, and can tell I'm fading pretty quickly. Hopefully this will get me onto the English time zone more quickly, I'd definitely prefer to be awake during normal hours!