Entries from March 2009 ↓

Some of the best photographs I’ve ever taken have been happy accidents.

I was once a very active pilot. I’m not now; I fly desks and mixing consoles and digital workstations now, and I have gradually grown away from airplane flying. Still, airplanes and airports and the people and lore that surround them have never ceased to hold a nostalgic, passionate appeal for me. I’m afraid I have become something of an armchair pilot, but the love of aviation will never die in me.

I have a fairly long commute to and from work. To break the monotony, on Tuesday evening I decided to go home via an unusual route. The road I used is not one I’m intimately familiar with, and I had not noticed the small, grass airstrip by the roadside before. Now, two men were pushing a small Cessna 150 out of a hangar and toward the strip. Fascinated, I quickly turned the car around and returned, parking next to some telephone equipment so as not to trespass on private property.

My camera, which has been with me every day for months now, rested in its spacious new LowePro bag* next to me on the passenger seat. I grabbed it, put on the 200mm zoom lens, and practically leapt from the car just as the plane began to taxi toward the far end of the grass runway. I watched it intently through my lens. I may have been watching a bit too intently, in fact, because presently a bright yellow Piper J-3 cub came zooming in, just a foot or three above my head, landing downwind. After checking to make sure I’d kept what little hair I have on my head, I snapped a few frames of the perfect landing.

Moments later I saw the cloud of dust that heralded the application of full power by the Cessna, and I once again raised the camera. I shot one frame just as the main gear left the ground, and a second a moment later as the plane began to climb. I followed the plane with my lens, zooming out to keep it in frame, until it passed over my head and I nearly fell over backward. A gymnast I am not.

As I recovered my balance, I turned and saw the plane climbing away against a beautiful backdrop of sunlit clouds, and by happy accident, I must have tripped the shutter at precisely the right moment. When I got home and saw the image, my emotional response was absolutely shocking.

This is the moment that makes flying more than the simple balance of thrust, drag, lift, and gravity. It’s the moment when the ground that has been our master loses its power over us, and we are free to roam all three dimensions. It’s the moment when the mind, as well as the body, takes flight. Those few seconds, just after takeoff, are magic.

I share the photo with you because I hope I captured some small measure of that feeling, that longing that it inspired in me. Photography, if nothing else, is a beautiful way to communicate feelings, emotions, and those other parts of our minds and souls that do not lend themselves to mere words.

* I have an amazingly wonderful fiancee’ … have I mentioned that lately?

I apologize for the headline, but it’s a fairly common trait among aviation people to be a little callous about airline crashes. I admit that I’d be far less so if I were personally involved, and I hope no one is deeply offended.

Last month, a Turkish airlines 737-800 crashed on approach to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. The cause of the crash, until recently, was somewhat puzzling. Reuters reported on Wednesday that Dutch investigators have now determined the cause of the crash.

As the aircraft passed through 2,000 feet on an approach flown by the autopilot, there was an apparent malfunction of one of the aircraft’s two radio altimeters, which judge its height above ground. The left instrument indicated -8 feet (8 feet below ground) and happened to also be the instrument the autopilot was using.

This erroneous signal caused the autopilot to reduce power to idle and begin a flare, believing that it was at touchdown when in reality it was still nearly two thousand feet in the air. The plane assumed an extreme nose-up attitude, stalled, and struck the ground tail first. The rest of the aircraft then pancaked into the ground, killing 9 of the 134 souls on board and seriously injuring 28 more.

Why didn’t the crew cross-check their altimeters during the approach? Why didn’t they notice the throttles being retarded to idle at altitude? All of the flight crew were among the dead, so we will perhaps never know. The aircraft’s flight data recorder, which contained data from the plane’s last eight flights, showed that the same altimeter had malfunctioned on two previous approaches and that the crew had successfully recovered in each instance.

I know that it’s very, very wrong to find humor in a situation like this, but I was unable to prevent the image from entering my head. I was always a big fan of the sitcom, “WKRP in Cincinnati,” because in my radio career I met at least one of every character created for that show. The show’s most famous and highest-rated episode featured a Thanksgiving promotion that went horribly wrong, and when I saw this Turkish 737 smashed on the ground on national TV, in my mind’s eyes and ears stood Arthur Carlson in tattered clothes, breathlessly saying,

“As God is my witness, I thought Turkish could fly.”