Over African skies

It's been a long day!

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with flying. I hate the thought of it, but actually get quite excited when I am up there and love to work out where I am and identify landmarks.

5 hours into our 10 hour flight I would have offered a lot to not be there, but there's not a lot of choice at that point. The lightening flashes below us were spectacular, but ..... Would this plane have been built to withstand them? Had the pilots had enough training? Had they seen lightening before? Was it normal?

The fact that we were on an Airbus 380 - for those of you who don't know it is the new double decker of the skies and takes over 500 passengers - made my first two questions seem quite pertinent to me! It had taken a while to work out at Frankfurt that the plane we were about to go on was one of these. It was the normal proportions for a plane and the only thing that, to me, looked any different was that it was very shiny! Once the penny had dropped I phoned Rob - an 'old' friend whose job is to check out the cabins of the new A380s and do the hand over to the new client - and he had indeed handed over two recently to Lufthansa.

Anyway, the flight went well and I enjoyed scanning the outside camera views and watching the rather amazing google-maps-sort-of-picture with our plane on it. This photo was taken of the view from camera 3 (presumably on the tail fin) as the sun was beginning to rise over the horizon somewhere over themiddle of the African continent.

Lucky girl or not?

Thanks for all your comments from yesterday - I'm not sure if this internet connection will stand up to me replying at the moment.