The Grumman F-14 Tomcat — a twin-engine, variable-sweep wing fighter in service with the U. S. Navy from 1974 – 2006.
Tag Archives: aircraft
Red Stars descending
Members of the RedStar Pilots Association help put on a show at the 2011 Rocky Mountain Airshow in Broomfield, Colorado:
These fine folks make a hobby of flying aircraft from countries in the former Soviet bloc. I think my favorite part of this shot is the shadows cast by the planes’ smoke plumes on the haze to the lower right…
QEC
A Quick Engine Change (QEC) unit for a historic P-38 fighter undergoes a rebuild at WestPac Restorations — on the campus of the (not quite open to the public yet) National Museum of WWII Aviation in Colorado Springs, Colorado:
QECs were developed to speed aircraft maintenance — containing an engine and all its support equipment, a QEC allowed an engine swap to be performed with a relatively short grounding of an aircraft.
I made this image on a recent tour of WestPac Restorations and the National Museum of WWII Aviation. The Museum has been designed and is in the process of collecting funding to start construction (anybody have $12M they can spare?). Meanwhile, they have monthly tours during summer months — my daughter and I went on a special tour this past weekend as part of an AIAA-sponsored group.
Cool stuff!
Left bank
The aeronautical kind, not the geographical kind. A T-6 “Texan” at the 2011 Rocky Mountain Air Show:
Shot with my Olympus E-5 and Sigma “Bigma” 50-500 lens at 420mm (equivalent to 840mm on a full-frame camera). I know there’s a second seat in back, but the cockpit still looks a bit cozy to me…
Spirit, overhead
Another Rocky Mountain Air Show shot — this one of a B-2 “Spirit” bomber:
Taken with my Oly E-5 and Sigma “Bigma” 50-500mm lens, at 228mm (456mm full-frame equivalent).
Like a shooting star
Another shot from this year’s Rocky Mountain Air Show:
This bird’s a T-33 trainer, essentially a 2-seat model of the F-80 “Shooting Star,” and sports the Thunderbird paint scheme.
I haven’t shot at an air show in years (since digital), so kind of had to start fresh for this. So I did what I usually do in situations like this — dug around on Flickr to see what focal length people used for the shots I liked the most. So I wound up taking only my Sigma 50-500 “Bigma” to the airshow (along with a monopod to keep my arms from wearing out).
The scheme worked pretty well — the above shot is actually a composite of two made with the lens racked out to 500mm (on my Olympus E-5, so that’s 1000mm full frame equivalent for folks with really big cameras). One original frame had the plane in front of fairly boring (flat) clouds:
The other frame had these interesting clouds with a much smaller / more distant image of the jet.
For those wanting to try something similar, here’s my advise to you:
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Don’t bother with a monopod, the jets at an airshow move too fast for one to be anything but a bother (even with a heavy lens).
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Yes, the “Bigma” really is slow to focus at 500mm — expect to take more shots than you’d desire, given that some of them will have missed focus. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good air show lens — at least on a cropped-frame camera, 50mm will cover most ground shots, and 500mm will get you some nice distance shots (out where the jets are easier to track).
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Bracket exposures if you have clouds anywhere in the sky, otherwise you’ll wind up with a bunch of underexposed airplanes on bright backgrounds.
Trojan aircraft
A T-28 “Trojan” goes through its paces:
This is the first in a series of shots I’ll be showing here from this year’s Rocky Mountain Air Show, up in Broomfield (Colorado).
Fly homeward, angel
