Passenger Captures Incredible View of Passing Storm From Plane

We can almost hear the angels’ trumpets proclaiming the glory of the heavens. With just a little bit of imagination, we can envision an entire city, a completely other world supported entirely on nested terraces of white linen and silk. Clouds. As Judy Collins sang in Both Sides Now,

“Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way”

Touching, immortal lyrics that will forever epitomize the grandeur of clouds.

But to see them personal and up close, a kind of tunnel of love that actually penetrates the clouds…the treasure of such a gift cannot be overvalued. It becomes a vision permanently ensconced in the sanctum sanctorum of the mind.

Entering the storm cloud, the passenger captures a majestic atmospheric kingdom using his iPhone 7. It was captured flying from Cape Town to Doha on an Airbus A350 near Faquira, Mozambique, Africa. The lead storm cloud looks like a giant mushroom, exploding upward, plateauing at some unknown altitude. Even though the range of the color spectrum is narrow, from pure white, and mottled only by subtle shading, with a perfectly blue canvas in the background, the textures are infinitely complex. Fluffy, stratified, cotton balls, layers of bed sheets. There are so many descriptions of clouds that it would take a life time to write about.

The family of clouds themselves come in many types, from billowing cumulous, to cirrocumulus, which reminds one of grazing sheep, to the rarified cirrus and cirrostratus. In the winter the ice crystals in cirrostratus clouds can refract sunlight into a translucent rainbow.

White and texture are not the only dimensions that can be perceived. Sunlight illuminates their surface, giving them energy and brilliance. There is one more dimension that can only be observed from the lofty heights of air travel, and that is depth. We almost get the sense from this video of being in a bowl of sky, surrounded by clouds, but also awe struck by the vast distances between clouds, especially those below us. Spatial distance is especially underscored by the parallax effect, where clouds in the foreground seem to move at a different rate than the clouds far off in the distance.

We almost don’t want to move, knowing there is nothing separating us from earth below except for a thin metal structure. The trust we place in the jet that carries us is absolute and complete. It must work as expected.