From: Jari Makinen, Finland science producer Jof the Finnish broadcasting company Date: Thu, 19 Nov 98 14:25:26 +0200 I returned from my holiday in New York back to Helsinki, Finland on 16 November on board Finnair flight AY 004 flying accross the Northern Atlantic ocean (16/17 November). I hoped to sleep as much as possible of the flight since we were going to fly over East Asia during the next (predicted maximum) night aboard Ursa astronomical association Leonid watch flight in East Siberian air space (Helsinki-Tokyo route). The Atlantic flight departed at Kennedy airport one hour late of the original departure time at about 1850 local time. After dinner I looked briefly into window: nothing exceptional and I got to sleep. I woke up during the night and naturally I peeked out of the narrow seat window to see if there were any leonids already to be observed. The immediate first glance of the window revealed two simultaneous bolides (approximately -4, -6) flying in the near same direction! The activity was clearly high! The immediate thoughts were ...if its going to be like this now, how will look like during the next night... The meteors were incessant and I concentrated to just watch and admire the big brightest ones, that left long glowing trails. Part of them seemed to explode in the end so that the surface and its details of the airplane wing emerged from the dark night momentarily as it was lit up. A couple of times the flash from the end explosion was so intense that the entire air plane window itself was illuminated as from nocturnal big lightning flash. I took a fifteen minute count from my watch. A bright meteor (Vega 0 mag or brighter) or bolid was visible from the narrow window roughly every 10 seconds... After each of these I counted seconds in my mind until the next bright one (and leaving the numerous faint, usual night meteors out of the count). Occasionally only 2 seconds were needed, at times it took to count until 20 to get to the next big one. After this I requested a permission to enter the cockpit and it took some ten minutes to get it. I woke up my travelling partner and gave him the window seat and went myself watching the meteor show from a corridor window. My partner told that the shooting stars were amazingly bright and numerous. When time came to enter the cockpit there was a turn in the activity. The number of both faint and bright meteors seemed to go noticeably down. In the cockpit the captain and the first officer had of course noticed the huge amount of bright meteors and were wondering about it. As I told them about the leonids the first officer said. "Aaah, oh yes and the comet itself seems has now been visible on the right side" pointing with his hand to a long enduring fireball smoke train twisting on the right side of the sky. Soon the day was breaking and I came back to my seat.