air power
I’m in a condo on a narrow beach of the bay that’s north of Tyndall Air Force Base. It’s about half a mile from the north end of the northernmost runways. Often F-4s, F-15s, F-16s, F-22s, and/or A-10s fly off the runways northward or southward for training sorties or to travel to- or from other bases. Many days aircrews will practice touch-and-gos repeatedly, and they bank over the condo, the beach, or the bay beyond my back porch. I can hear the jets roar overhead or beyond the beach hour after hour, and if look up, I can see the planes’ bellies 170-300 meters overhead as they bank southward to approach the north ends of the runways. Usually the landing gear is hung out. The pilots don’t bother to retract it during short loops in the sky between take-offs and landings. If one will land again and again, why bother retracting the gear?
Since moving here at the turn of the year, I have never photographed the undersides of the airplanes, for two reasons. I don’t want to make pictures of airplanes with gear hung out and landing lights lit. I want to see a clean configuration or armaments and fuel tanks hung. Second, my long lens was infected by fungus and thus makes images that are ‘soft’ in the middle. I found this when I took the lens to Naval Air Station Pensacola last autumn to photograph the last 2009 Blue Angels demonstration (and Fat Albert’s last rocket-assisted take-off). I won’t make photos of flying airplanes with my short lenses. What’s the point? And I can’t afford to buy a high-quality telephoto lens to replace the unrepairable infected one…
Today, when came home, I saw two F-15s banking hard and banking low, without landing gear hung out in the wind. What a sight: a near-perfect plan view of medium-to-dark grey warbirds backed by dark cumulus clouds. I wish I had a photo of one of them. The close, perfect ventral view of a grey plane in front of grey storm clouds … (sigh) Not worth the price of a new (or used) lens ($1000+), though …
For your enjoyment, here’s a 1.6 Mb photo of a Tyndall Air Force Base F-15D ejecting flares:
from U.S. Air Force