2024-06-24
I sat in the jumpseat in the cockpit of a Boeing 787. Both pilots were sitting quite far away from me, with a few meters of emptiness between us, and they were staring at TVs. They could not see outside as there was no windshield. The pilots were probably interacting with a Windows based computer through those TVs, as the button that opens the QRH opened a PDF file in Adobe Reader or Acrobat XI, the same UI that I have on my old Windows computers.
I was busy planning my own wedding, though I do not remember to whom. I finished a phone call right as we were about to land, with my correspondent wishing me a good landing. One of the TVs was displaying something similar to Google Earth, with very blurry satellite views and some basic 3D terrain. The runway we were about to land on was much less blurry.
We touched down on the runway and overran it completely according to that 3D view. It was also showing that we were rolling uphill, and that got us back off the ground, before we touched down on a second runway a little further away. We repeated that pattern four times before coming to a stop. We felt none of this, and I told myself this was because the map was out of date, and we just landed on a much longer, brand new runway that merged all of those smaller runways together and was flat.