Ode to the aerial

This is prompted by comedian Louie CK, who i was introduced to last night. I haven't ever bought a flight of my own, as an adult, and am usually the first to decry flying as a means of transport. However last week i did, and in communicating this someone bluntly upbraided me for my sinful action - what a reversal! Anyway, the flight was truly awe inspiring and i'm going to transcribe what i wrote from the plane window:

There is heaven, above the clouds. A frozen stampede, innumerable fluffy amorphous clumps like an Ice Age herd of migrating herbivores - the sky-herd; herd of herds. Heading, seemingly sunwards, past me and the passengers of this airplane.
Some isolated, others stacked up, toppling over one another in their hurry, tails petering out behind. Yet, a silent, unmoving tableau, somehow operatic, classical. Forms found in biblical paintings, those of ancient myth and pantheons.
Gilded water below, a luminous skin on a hot milky drink, again removed from its assumed real state - it looks dry, still. I see the ripples of waves and  their white crests, but....frozen.
Now, above an island; Sardinia? Clouds are tall, great columns here, blown out of first cumulus shape, casting huge shadows on a land of sinuous contours. Green fields, few towns. Who will look up at me?
The clouds are finite, concrete, palpable. Pompous, joyous, curious and gregarious. another plane trails to our right, slightly behind - we race, toys.
Sunlight illumines the nebulous gases, bright lines of the child's landscape we traverse.  Suddenly a scalloped coastline of shallow beaches, and an ultramarine pristine surface again
The island behind silhouetted in shape, gold sea sharply outlines.
On the southern horizon banks of cloud appear as Antartica, as glaciers, and icebergs.
Humans are amazing to have created this mode of travel, allowing such privileged perspectives.
A wispy plateau of white obscures the Tyrrhenian Sea. Even more opaque white on the ground; snow on Italy's mountains. Long arched viaducts, bridges. Topography is blatant, some trickery transmittable in 2D visual form. Water finding it's way, always spreading, diverging, the fractal of leaves.
All Greece is a blanket of pale, mix of cloud and ground, impenetrable.
Reaching Istanbul is the most dazzling sight: descending after twilight succumbed to true dark, upon a bejewelled kingly robe cast over the land. A myriad coloured lights, strewn baubles shimmering, the wealth of a history of empire. And I myself am from Ruby; making sense of my own name, a precious jewel. I set myself in the city.