It's up there somewhere

We couldn't see it, but there was bound to be blue sky up there somewhere.

When I took students up on their first flight, if it was a cloudy day they would wonder at the brightness of the sky on breaking through the top of the cloud – a pilot's sun, I used to tell them.

It's not always true, of course.  I had a passenger trip in the back of an F-15 Eagle in about 1981, taking off from Ramstein in Germany.  Two aircraft had diverted to Ramstein from the normal base because of weather and they had a spare seat, which I was happy to occupy.  

There had been a heavy snowfall and we had to clear the snow off the aircraft before starting the engines and departing.  We climbed to over 30,000ft on that occasion without more than a gentle glow from the sun, promising great brightness but never fulfilling that promise.  So we just descended to the squadron's base, Bitburg near the town made famous by that rather excellent beer, and went for one, or two . . .