I sat alone in my Natural Science 208 class. The view outside was of uninterrupted blackness, and turning on the landing lights on only changed the blackness to gray, and revealed the torrent of snow heading past the airplane. Alternately, turning on the wingtip strobe lights produced a freeze frame of snowflakes suspended within the sphere of gray that surrounded me. For the moment though, my little part of the world was peaceful and safe.

I was warm and dry, the engine was making all its familiar noises, and all the electronic gadgetry was said I was right where I wanted to be. I was cruising at 10,000 feet over what I knew to be the rolling Pennsylvania farmland 40 miles southwest of Binghamton. It is a familiar stretch of sky for me, I fly it five nights a week in this airplane, and I have flown it down low and more personal in my own airplane

I knew that on most nights I could look off my right wing and see the lights of the triple cities in the distance from this point, but tonight the best view was straight ahead. Since being chased from 8,000 to 10,000 feet by an isolated pocket of freezing rain, I had flown along and watched occasional purple splashes of static electricity jump between the small defroster plate and the windshield underneath it. These occasional flashes had built into a miniature purple tornado at the upper inside corner, as static electricity streamed into the turbulent air at the edge of the plate. The grand finale of this show was when the entire arc of the propeller in front of me glowed purple as static electricity bled from the propeller tips.

So to speak the airplane was glowing in the dark, carrying a static charge of thousands of volts, and I was reassured by it. I would rather have been looking at Binghamton through crisp winter air, or at a sky-full of stars, but the purple splashes meant that I had no immediate worry about airframe ice. I was flying through snow, which generally means that there is no danger of ice, but the purple glow was an absolute guarantee, since very dry air is a requisite for the buildup of static electricity.

It was an interesting night for me. I had always wondered what kind of sky was above a landscape that is choked almost to nothingness in a winter snowstorm. On this night I found it to be like a hot dog; what you see on the outside is the same thing you see anywhere inside it. I had worried too, about finding the runway at the end of a flight like this. I had practiced it a hundred times, and observed it once but never done it for real... There is a difference. Fate provided me with abundant proof that this too, is no great problem.

My destination was Elmira, but at the last minute I had to change course for Syracuse because Elmira's runways were not cleared. I've been to Syracuse before, but "the numbers" are not nearly as familiar as Elmira or Newark. At the end of my landing approach, Just as the bright approach lights emerged from the grayness ahead, the tower told me to climb back up because of traffic on the runway. This gave me the chance to prove that the success of the first approach had not been a fluke.

I had departed Newark an hour and a half earlier in the calm just before the storm's arrival there. On the ground now in Syracuse it was cold, windy, and snowing hard enough that the other side of the airport was just visible. I refueled, made some phone calls, took on some more freight, got deiced with a spray of hot glycol, and was on my way to Elmira. It was an ugly morning in Syracuse. Every aspect of the weather was unfavorable, and everybody's normal routines were disrupted. Nothing happened automatically, everything had to be planned out and watched closely. It was a busy time, and I was pleased that I was able to work through it.

Arrival at Elmira was almost an anticlimax. After watching the ground below me gradually disappear into the winter storm hours earlier over northern New Jersey, I had escaped a pocket of freezing rain, and then been reassured by the glow of St Elmo's fire. I was diverted to a different airport where I made not one but two approaches in wind- driven snow, and contended with the confusion of a busy freight ramp on a bad morning.

I had faced some difficult pitches, but now I found myself sliding into home safely as Elmira's approach lights eaked into view straight ahead. I trotted to the dugout feeling much better than I felt a few hours earlier. It wasn't more than in instant in time since I had stepped to the plate, but already it seemed so long ago.