Have you ever seen the magnificent Northern Lights in real life? Well the passengers of EZY1806 flight from Iceland’s Reykjavik to the UK’s Manchester got lucky as they witnessed them from the plane
The pilot of an EasyJet plane was on his route to Manchester when he suddenly took a 360-degree turn surprising the passengers briefly. What followed was a lifetime experience for the in-flight passengers
A video shared by the passenger Adam Groves showed the plane going around the Natural Lights in dynamic patterns as they filled the sky. The passengers took quick pictures of it which showed the sky filled with green and pink lights
Adam Groves thanked the pilot for the lifetime experience. He wrote, “Big thanks to the easyJet pilot of EZY1806 from Reykjavik to Manchester who did a 360 fly by mid-flight to make sure all passengers could see the incredible Northern Lights.”
The unexpected 360-degree turn by the pilot also left the flight trackers in the Air Traffic Control (ATC) room bewildered. Flightradar24 tweeted “An @easyJet flight just made a 360 turn over the North Sea… so the reason was probably to allow passengers on both sides of the aircraft to see the fantastic #AuroraBorealis.”
The Northern Lights are formed when energised particles from the sun slam into the Earth's upper atmosphere at speeds of up to 45 million mph (72 million kph), but our planet's magnetic field protects us from the onslaught creating a spectrum of light
Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei named the Northern Lights "aurora borealis" after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek god of the north wind, Boreas. The earliest suspected record of the northern lights is in a 30,000-year-old cave painting in France
Some of the regions likely to witness frequent occurrences of Northern Lights are Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Alberta in Canada and Greenland among others
While Northern Lights are famous, there is another astronomical phenomenon named Southern Lights. They are also similar to aurora borealis but originate due to the magnetic pull of the South pole