August 2026 – On August 12th 2026 I had the chance to fly through a total solar eclipse in my twin-engine Diamond DA42.
A week earlier I had flown the Diamond DA42 to Iceland. With family I spent days of sun and easy weather — the kind of Icelandic summer you hope for and rarely get. Then eclipse day arrived, and the sky over the west of the country closed like a lid. Thick, low cloud covered the whole of western Iceland, exactly where the path of totality would sweep through.
For Reykjavík this was no ordinary eclipse. It was the first total solar eclipse over the capital in nearly six hundred years. The last one was on June 17th 1433, more than three centuries before Reykjavík was officially founded in 1786 as a trading town. The next will not come until May 26th 2245. On the ground west of the city the Sun would stand barely 25 degrees above the horizon, at an azimuth of about 248 degrees — low in the west-southwest. That geometry decided our plan. To put ourselves in the centre of the shadow I calculated that we needed to fly roughly six nautical miles due west of the centreline at flight level 180 — 18,000 feet above the ocean.
We were just one of at least ten aircraft that intended to fly through the eclipse. Reykjavík Airport was busy in the way only a small field can be when everyone needs to be airborne at the same time. Still, the departure went smoothly. Air traffic control even cleared us for the route we had planned: a climb to FL180, passing just north of Keflavík, Iceland’s international airport.
Even at that height we were not above the cloud. South along the centreline, though, we found a hole — a place where the overcast broke and the sky above our ceiling was clear. We stayed in that position in a hold for almost 30 minutes (our spare time in case of a delayed departure or a reroute by air traffic control), a little more than 100 kilometres southwest of the tip of Reykjanes. The umbra was coming. The Moon’s shadow raced across Earth at more than 3,000 kilometres an hour. One moment the Atlantic was ordinary afternoon light. The next, for more than two minutes, it was dark, with a yellow “sunrise” in the far distance in all directions.
There is still no language that quite holds a total solar eclipse. This was my sixth totality, my third under a clear sky, and my first from an aeroplane. An aircraft is a poor camera platform — vibration, limited angles, a canopy that wants to reflect everything — but as a place to be, it is something else. The world below went dark while we hung in a thin band of clear air. The corona stood out against a sudden dark sky that looked like night. After two minutes of magic the diamond ring flashed once more for a few seconds, and the light came flooding back.
We turned for home with the shadow already gone out over the Atlantic, racing toward Spain. The photographs will never be the best I have taken of an eclipse. The memory will.
We spent a good half hour flying back to Reykjavík Airport, most of the return flight in thick cloud.
Having my airplane in Iceland for more than a week also made room for another two remarkable flights. One was a two-and-a-half-hour round trip out of Reykjavík, circling over landscapes such as Hekla and the vast ice of Vatnajökull. The other was a return flight to Vestmannaeyjar, the Westman Islands.
Flightseeing out of Reykjavik
A few pictures from our two-and-a-half-hour round trip out of Reykjavik. Over Hekla, Lakagigar, Vatnajökull, Grimsvotn, Trölladyngja, Hofsjökull, Langjökull and Eriksjökull.
Return trip to Vestmannaeyjar, the Westman Islands.
A few pictures from our daytrip to Westman Islands.
Our return trip via Faroe Islands
And finally, a single photograph from the approach to runway 12 at Vágar Airport (EKVG) in the Faroe Islands. We stayed one night in Tórshavn before continuing back to Roskilde (EKRK), my home airport.
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