The pilot who reported this story responded on some questions:
Unknown orange/red glow over Pacific Ocean - Airwork
About (squid)fishing fleet and why I think they are not the cause of the red lights/glow;
-First of all; these fleets fish with relatively small vessels and the lights we saw were HUGE. If they were a fleet of ships, I expect them to be very large military vessels, or even oil platforms, and not fishing ships. I have seen many of those fleets in many parts of the world and the lights are very small normally.
- Fishing boats always use bright green or white lights since those lights penetrate the seawater deepest. Red light (or orange) is never used for fishing, since it does not attract any fish and the second problem is that the light frequency of red (and orange) does not penetrate deep into the blue seawater. It is therefore unusable for fishing at sea. The color as seen in my photos is the same color we saw with the naked eye.
- Fishing boats (especially fishing for squid) are hunting on the continental shelf, or preferably on the edge of the shelf where the continental plate plunges into the deep sea, since this is the place where most fish come to breed and eat. Fishing with such a large fleet in the deepsea so far from the continental plate does not make sense and for as far as I know and could find out, never happens. Please look into this and you'll see my point.
Check my last two uploaded maps with the coordinates of the sighting and you'll see that the location is very far away from the nearest continental shelf.
Please note that I am not drawing any conclusions here, though the cause being a fishing-fleet can almost immediately be dismissed.
Me and my colleague have a lot of experience with nightflights and flying over those fishing fleets in Asia and the (South-)Atlantic.. What we saw here was according to our observation absolutely not a (squid) fishing fleet but possibly a large military Russian fleet during a (possibly secret, since the airspace was not closed) salvage or missile-test (might explain the flash 20-30 minutes before). The same day, a large US military exercise took place South of Japan. More information to follow soon probably.