All my life, I had wanted to witness a total solar eclipse. But it was always too cloudy, or I was someplace where the thing wasn’t happening, skyscrapers obfuscated the view, whatever. So when the U.S. Air Force all but guaranteed an unobstructed view of this past April’s big event, I was intrigued.
I wouldn’t have to worry about clouds, they assured me, because I’d be riding in the back of a T-38 fighter jet high above any potential weather, and directly along the narrow path of totality. The clear canopy glass surrounding me in the plane’s cockpit meant I could pretty much see 360 degrees in all directions.
I’ve done my share of out-there military aviation stories: flown supersonic in an F-15, F-16, F-18, and MiG-25 Foxbat, pulling as many as 9Gs and traveling as high as 84,000 feet. But never was it to witness something as rare as Mother Nature’s spectacular light show display during a total eclipse.
So last April I flew to Sheppard AFB near Wichita Falls, Texas. Photographer Mike Killian would be flying next to me in a separate T-38 with a long-lens camera to capture high-resolution photos and video. I jokingly asked if I, say, ejected from the aircraft during totality, would that make for a better photograph? We both laughed.
That said, anytime a civilian rides in a military aircraft, he or she must undergo ejection seat instruction in the event that something unexpectedly goes south. Fighter jets are no joke. We did our egress training after breakfast, as well as took the mandatory medical exams.
The T-38 is an impressive plane. Built back in the 1960s, 124 reside now at Sheppard, most of which are used to train pilots in the Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training Program and NASA astronauts. It can pull 7Gs and fly supersonic.
The last total solar eclipse accessible in the U.S. was 2017, but it was shorter in duration than this one, and its path passed over more remote areas of the country. The next big one in the U.S. won’t occur until 2044. That’s why this eclipse is special.
Hundreds of thousands of folks flew in from all over the country to be in the path of a roughly 115-mile-wide swath of totality that stretched from Mexico to Canada. In Laurel, the event would be viewable at 89% of totality—pretty good.
At 1 p.m., it was wheels-up in our T-38s. Strapped-in snugly with a complex safety harness system and donning a flight suit, helmet, and oxygen mask, it was pretty cramped in the cockpit. My pilot, Capt. Connor “Gutter” Sipe was seated directly in front of me. We communicated via helmet radios.
In addition to everything else, I had on a pair of cardboard eclipse sunglasses over my regular prescription glasses. The special dark lenses are needed for eclipse viewing, particularly in places like Laurel where it wouldn’t be total. Looking directly at a partially eclipsed sun without dark glasses could result in blindness.
As the altitude gauge in our T-38 clicked off 1,000-foot chunks, we gradually rose, leveling off at 30,000 feet, above all clouds. When we were 140 miles from Sheppard, the two other T-38s with us began maneuvering into position for totality photos. It was tough, as you can imagine. We were all at the behest of Air Traffic Control, and dozens of commercial planes were congested in the same air space, both for the eclipse and flying into nearby Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.
Almost without warning, the sky suddenly darkened, then went black. I strained my neck to look straight up, almost 90 degrees. There was this little pitch-black ball with a strange orange/white halo around it. I was finally witnessing a total solar eclipse.
The image was smaller than I had expected, but no less spectacular than I had imagined. I clumsily tried to take some photos with my cellphone, but quickly realized it was a waste of time. Take in the experience, I thought. Leave the photos to the pros. After just over four minutes of totality, the eclipse was over - as fast as it had begun. I did manage to see the famous “diamond ring effect” as the sun began peeking out again from behind the moon.
When we touched down back at Sheppard after about an hour in the air, I was a bit confused. Everything had happened so fast. I’d seen the blackness of space, and the thin electric blue atmosphere hanging over Earth’s curvature during my MiG flight in 1999. But this was different. It was day one moment, night the next.
The sun was there, and then it wasn’t. I saw the planet Venus appear in the blackened sky, and a number of stars, too. And, as the eclipse moved out of totality, I could actually see the eclipse’s giant shadow moving along the ground. The lights of a city below, probably Dallas, were clearly visible, and it was early afternoon. None of this with the MiG, though. A total eclipse is different from a high-altitude flight, and just as surreal.
A month before the eclipse, I had interviewed Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart. At the time, he mentioned that while he had never seen an eclipse from a plane, he’d seen several from the ground. The sudden cooling of the air, eerie quietness from confusion of birds and other wildlife during the unexpected darkness, and the long, strange shadows cast on the ground were as fascinating as the spectacle of the glowing dark sun itself, he said.
Schweickart was curious as to what my experience would be up high but suggested that next time I experience an eclipse on terra-firma. If I’m still around in 20 years, I’ll take the astronaut up on his challenge.
Jim Clash immerses himself in extreme adventures for Forbes magazine. He graduated from Laurel High School in 1973. His latest book is Amplified: Interviews With Icons of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
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