Looking Out The Window, SLC To JFK And Back

Just a quick aerial pictorial from the last trip from SLC to JFK…

 

Major traffic in the sky that morning.

 

Taking off out of SLC, you could see how much smoke was in the air from forest fires up in Idaho.  This summer seemed to be the summer that the West burned.

 

Again, lots of smoke from fires, but you can also see all of the trees that are changing color.  Fall is I think, my favorite season.  Not only is it the lead up to the holidays, but its natures gift, a way to say thanks for the upcoming winter and introducing color to prepare you for cold and harsh.  Gonna have to get down there and ride a horse.

 

By the time we hit the mid-West, the air had cleared some, but you could still see a haze.

 

Its always amazing to think how inhospitable the it is out there at 35,000 feet.  On this flight, it was -54 degrees F with no oxygen to speak of.  In all of the exploration we are doing for exoplanets, the habitability envelope that we live is is remarkably small.

 

This is the General Motors proving grounds.  It looks like an amazing facility, even from 35,000 feet up.  The facility itself would make for a fantastic photo-essay actually.  Something that would be a riot of fun to try and do.

 

The other amazing thing about looking out the window is seeing how much land is devoted to farming.  It really is an impressive finding that so much land is devoted to farming, yet fewer and fewer people seem to be aware of what goes into producing the food that all of us depend upon.

 

I’ve seen this image a few times now flying in and out of NYC, even this year.  Its been interesting watching the development of lower Manhattan including Ground Zero and the new Freedom Tower.  From the air, the memorial site looks so intriguing, but as I wrote about here, the Ground Zero Memorial experience on the ground is far less attractive.  For all of the amazing things about NYC, the Ground Zero memorial is terribly disappointing and crass.  Its a gravesite, right?  Why all the exploitation?

 

Depending upon which runway you land on at JFK, you might find yourself flying quite a ways out over the Atlantic.  A few years ago flying into JFK, we flew out a ways over the Atlantic on a beautiful day with blue skies.  Looking down into the Atlantic, I saw a shadow that initially I thought was our own aircraft shadow.  But when I looked closer, it was a submarine, likely American, but definitely a submarine.  Kinda cool to see that from the air.  Ever since then, I’ve carried a camera with me and ensured that I got a window seat when I fly.  You never know what you might see.

 

Seeing the Boeing Dreamlifter was a bit of a rush.  This aircraft is a bulked up 747…  Crazy to think about, but true. This is actually an aircraft that I’ve been wanting to see for a long time.  Perhaps one of these days, I’ll get to see one up close?  Regardless, this is one, huge, aircraft.  The photo on top is of the Dreamlifter next to an Korean Air, Airbus A380, another absolute leviathan of an aircraft.  My friend Duncan has flown on the A380 and perhaps I’ll get a chance one of these days as well.  I hear that Emirates Air is quite nice and they also apparently fly A380s.  It is a remarkably big aircraft…  The trick would be how to photograph it up close in a way that reveals how absolutely big it is.  I’ve photographed big planes before, but it would be fun to shoot images of a big civilian aircraft.

That’s it for this trip.  Another couple of trips are coming up, so perhaps those aerial shots will also appear here.

 

3 Replies to “Looking Out The Window, SLC To JFK And Back”

    1. I’ve been meaning to do this more often, but you end up working mostly. Though I gotta say, Gogo inflight was not working very well for me on these flights. No bandwidth, so I ended up looking out the windows more…

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