Well, it guarantees you won't have clouds blocking it.

So if turns out to be totally overcast wherever you would have been on the ground, this is going to change everything.

> Well, it guarantees you won't have clouds blocking it.

No it doesn’t. Very low probability, yes, guaranteed to not be clouds, no.

How can there be a cloud cover at FL300 so large that the plane cant navigate out of it?

Lots of scenarios where the pilot isn’t allowed to diverge from a flight path without getting into how freak events happen with the weather all the time.

Cirrocumulus clouds are common on that flight path and can extend up to FL450. Is it rare that they are that high, for sure, but can it happen, definitely.

Cirrostratus clouds are also a possibility and they often extend up to FL400. Whenever the sky has a soft white haze, these are a common cause.

Will either of those guaranteed ruin an eclipse, probably not. But still saying guaranteed no cloud cover obstructing the view is very much inaccurate imho.

Yeah when normal people talk (not pilots) an event with >99 percent probability should be deemed a certainty. As a pilot however i agree with you that you absolutely cannot make any assumptions about cloud cover

Depends on how you define normal people. If you are someone who is ponying up $25k+ for this flight on secondary markets you also should know that the chance is non-zero, albeit close.

Yeah thats fair also.

Cloud cover isn't the same effect as an eclipse. An eclipse still has effect on a cloudy day.

And a cloud in the dark sky looks the same from above vs below. The difference is how the sun itself looks.

The path of totality is only 115 miles wide so from 30,000 feet you would be able to see edges of the shadow below you.

You’re also guaranteed to be able to see the eclipse because you’re flying above any cloud cover.

If you look at a map of the "path of totality" for a total solar eclipse, think of it as a series of small time windows only a few minutes long, where one window ends another begins. I say that as if it's discrete, but really it's continuous and overlapping. Anyway, totality will begin in Texas at 1:27 PM CT and end in Maine at 3:35 PM ET, which is a little more than an hour. So theoretically you could be traveling at the same speed as the eclipse, from Texas to Maine in that hour, seeing an eclipse the whole time instead of just a few minutes!

Of course, the article makes no such claim that this is their plan. After all, planes don't go 2000 MPH. But they do go 600+ MPH, so maybe if things go perfectly you'll have 20 minutes of eclipse. Call it 10 minutes due to inability to rapidly correct for a slightly wrong departure time. Better than the 4 minutes you'd get standing still.

Totality isn't very interesting for longer periods of time, on a plane It's just dark. The transition toward and away from totality is interesting.

True, and the peculiar reaction of animals (brief nocturnal activity) won't be very noticeable from the air either.

> planes don't go 2000 MPH

SR-71: hold my beer

Majority of the path has an extremely high chance of cloud coverage (70%), so maybe this alleviates that?

https://eclipsophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/April-No...

It'd definitely alleviate it. I'm going to Vermont to try to see it (coinciding with my wedding) and the weather is really the only thing worrying me at the moment.

Congratulations!

If you have bad weather, it may ruin the eclipse. Don't let it ruin the wedding by letting it ruin your attitude.

Oh yeah, absolutely prepared for it haha. I appreciate it!

I was able to catch the last eclipse in 2016/17 (?) and am using the wedding to trick all my loved ones into (hopefully) getting to experience one too.

I imagine it’s pretty cool watching the shadow be cast over the earth.

Wouldn't it be the same experience you get on a sunset flight followed by a sunrise flight? It's not like you'd see a spotlight of darkness, it's a gradient and likely too large to see moon curvature.

You're trying to conflate the sunset terminator vs the very small and well defined shadow of the moon itself. Totally different concepts. The shadow of the moon is a spotlight of darkness. This is so not the same thing as the Earth rotating out of view of the sun.

For example: https://image.pbs.org/poster_images/assets/buac18-vid-epicmo...

How is the edge of that shadow any less blurred than a sunrise or sunset?

For example, a normal sunrise you get on thousands of normal flights every day:

https://images.app.goo.gl/BHvD5aBSqkA9kT6C6

In addition to other comments: You see it for much longer than if you are in one place.