Does anyone look out of the window?

So here’s a thing…  

Recently we flew out from the UK to Canada flying on a route that took us over Greenland, Hudson Bay, the vast plains of Canada before crossing the Rocky Mountains and landing at Vancouver.  The flight was a morning flight so all of this was comfortably in UK daytime hours and it was daylight all the way across.  Most importantly, there was almost no cloud and we had great views of the ground until the Rockies.  As far as I could tell, nobody was looking out of the window (they were all blacked out) - except me that is.  

I’ve noticed this a number of times before on long haul flights.    Very few travellers seem to be in the slightest interested in what’s (30,000 feet or so) under their nose.  They are probably concentrating on enduring the flight which isn’t very pleasant these days.

Yes, much of the time, there is cloud cover that obscures the view.  But when it’s clear, the world is spectacular.  Something you might pay good money to see (well, you did already).  For me, I clearly remember quite a few stunning flights.  For example, flying down the west coast of the Sahara along the Atlantic shoreline, across the Hidu Kush with the Himalayan high peaks in the distance, down the Nile river from the delta to Lake Victoria the river a bright ribbon across the Sahara, up from Jordan past Israel and Lebanon across the biblical lands to the Mediterranean behind or simply over the peaks of the Alps in Europe.

Here are a few from my last trip photographed through the airplane window with my iPhone 12 (flying at 37,000’), though I simply watched in awe most of the time.  I don’t really know when I will get to step foot onto Greenland or see giant ice flows close up.