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Accidental Reporter
28th December 2015
Have Camera, Will Travel
When I later returned to the airport, the lobby overlooking the tarmac was jammed with loads of very anxious onlookers. After considerable wrangling I was able to find a small standing space next to a window from which I could view the arrival gate.
The wait was about 30 minutes. Due to the inclement weather, you could see only the faint lights of the A380. They grew larger and somewhat brighter as the aircraft approached the runway. As the aircraft touched down, the crowd broke out into cheers and applause. Flight SQ380 then hurried past us, exited the runway and made a U-turn to taxi to the awaiting gate. Down below on the tarmac, scores of workers and dozens of vehicles were on hand to greet the arrival.
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I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time. Being able to report on the arrival of this Singapore to Sydney flight back in 2007 is another reminder to me to continue to carry a camera while traveling.
And of course I was able to use the camera to take a few sightseeing pictures as well.
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Written by Arnie Lee
Let’s not put our noses in the wrong place
01st December 2012
Note: This is a reprint of an article originally published in 2010.
For quite a few years now, the beleaguered airlines have been slowly implementing ways to increase their revenues as they try to stem their losses. Quietly, airlines have been adding fees for food, checked luggage, pillows and blankets and now Spirit Airlines proposes to charge for carry-ons. In fact, the bold European airline Ryanair, has asked Boeing to design an aircraft with more seats and fewer bathrooms. They have publicly stated a plan to charge to use the bathroom.
Shooting Planes
30th November 2010
Aviation Photography
learn from my many years of practice |
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Over the years, I’ve shot many planes – with a camera. In fact, I’ve been interested in aviation for a long time. I began taking pictures of all things aviation at a young age and recall the excitement of visiting the airport to pick up relatives. I would race to the rooftop viewing area to catch a glimpse of the planes like these: | ||
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Let’s skip forward 30 years to the mid-1990s when our company has already become involved with flight simulation. I find myself immersed in the emerging new world of digital photography and am now ready to marry two of my long time interests: photography and aviation. With digital, the equipment and processing techniques are radically different from conventional film photography. But the basics of photography haven’t changed much. Therefore I’m in a position to benefit from my prior photographic know-how. |
Earth Day 2010 – looking backward and forward and upward
21st April 2010
Earth Day 2010
… 40 years and still counting Note: This recently updated article was adapted from an article written for Earth Day 2007.
On a daily basis owing to my job, my thoughts are usually centered on the topic of photography, aviation and airplanes. But recently, a few things happened to jog my memory and I was carried back to the first Earth Day of 1970. Stick with me. I’ll get the other parts soon enough. From the time I first started reading his compelling and humorous books, novelist Kurt Vonnegut has been one on my favorite authors. He died in April 2007 shortly before the original version of this article was published. With his passing I made it a point to listen to my favorite NRP radio station and to read the newspaper articles about one of America’s funniest writers of the 20th century. I also made my way over to the local bookstore to buy a few Vonnegut books so as to refresh my slowly failing memory with a few of his lesser known works. The news coverage of his life and death had my mind wandering back to the late 60’s and early 70’s when I was a student at the University of Michigan (U of M) in the small city of Ann Arbor. Somewhere in that time frame, Vonnegut was asked to be “Writer in Residence” at the University. As one of the most widely read authors of the 1960’s generation, he was sure to have a large, welcoming audience among would-be writers studying at the U of M. He sometimes frequented a small, local campus restaurant called “The Brown Jug” where he’d have breakfast and smoke lots of cigarettes. It was popular lore that he claimed smoking to be the slowest form of suicide. My wife Kris, then a student and part-time waitress, was also a Vonnegut reader. On occasion, she would wait on him in the restaurant. She admitted, that owing to her hearing difficulty, she was not a very good waitress and therefore frustrated the celebrated writer with her (lack of) service. More to the point, his purpose on campus as writer in residence ended when he left prematurely declaring something to the effect: “I’m leaving Ann Arbor since I have nothing much to teach you about writing.” So it goes.
To put things in the proper perspective, 1970 was a very vibrant, exciting and yet conflicted era. I’m reminded of Charles Dicken’s quotation in my high school year book which aptly describes the period: “it was the best of times and it was the worst of times….we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way”. This was the period of Viet Nam and Kent State, living off the earth and making peace, hippies and long hair. We were contemporaries of heavy metal, Motown, James Taylor, Woodstock and The Beatles music. With this as a backdrop, we happen upon the Earth Day 1970 teach-in at the U of M. Not long after Vonnegut’s departure from the campus, we were treated to a free music concert. The popular folk song artist Gordon Lightfoot came to town to perform for more than 12,000 screaming students in one of the large stadiums at the University. Gord had had been drawing large audiences around the US, Canada and Europe with his classic Canadian Railroad Trilogy (click for lyrics), a poetic ballad describing the building of the railroads across Canada and the difficult tradeoffs between developing the economy and keeping the land pristine for the future. His music was great back then and to this day, I remain a Lightfoot fan. I was so much the fan that two years ago I traveled to Las Vegas (by myself since no family member wanted to accompany me) to hear him in concert at the Orleans Casino. And I ended up staying for two of his performances. Would you believe that I even have a life size poster of Gord which I gifted to myself courtesy of the advertising manager at the Orleans? Anyway, traveling back to 1970, we understood that Lightfoot’s appearance was part of what was to be part of the first Earth Day teach-in, a gathering of some 50,000 in Ann Arbor to discuss, educate and find solutions to environmental problems created by the earth’s inhabitants. From all of the excitement and the energy which went into the production of the first Earth Day teach-ins, many of us believed that we were on the verge of saving the environment. As an economics student, I was counting on a future career that would revolve around conservation, ecology and recycling. At the time, I was deeply serious about this course of study. I studied writings from the likes of educators and humanists Kenneth Boulding, Buckminster Fuller and E.F. Schumacher and took courses such as remote sensing of the environment and cost-benefit analysis. My great enthusiasm for all things environmental waned some time after graduating with a degree in Natural Resource Economics. It was fully a year later that I was still trying to find a job in this nascient field. Instead, I ended up in the computer business. So it goes. As I usually stay away from public discussions about politics, I won’t comment on how well or how poorly the earth’s inhabitants have done to improve the environment over the past 40 years. However, like others, I have observed a very large and urgent movement in recent years to resurrect many of the same or similar ideas from these earlier decades that call for a change in our lifestyles. As a side note, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet was introduced to the world at about this same time. Its launch was just coincidental to the first Earth Day. So what does all of this rambling have to do with aviation and photography? {Among other topics, our company is involved with both flight simulation and photography.} Well, to continue in the same vein, I thought it might be interesting to look at several aircraft and compare their individual environmental impact. Here’s a table that I compiled from publicly available data.
Acknowledging that the raw data in the above table is open to much discussion, it is still interesting to compare gross numbers. When Earth Day 1 was held, the most was the most widely used aircraft of the time was Boeing’s 727. As you can see, the fuel consumption per passenger of the three-engine 727 was more than double that of the twin-engine Boeing 737 used as the daily workhorse today. As already noted, the original Boeing 747-100 appeared about the same time as Earth Day 1. And its fuel consumption was comparable to the Boeing 727. We see that today’s Boeing 747-400 has 20% better fuel economy today than its early predecessor. As it is today, noise pollution was also a concern in 1970. Pushed by local community noise abatement regulations, many airports placed restrictions on night time operations giving us more quiet sleep time. At the same time, aircraft manufacturers were making continuous reductions in engine noise. By some accounts, we’re told that engine noise is 50% less than in 1970. The industry has been on the right track over this time period. And preliminary estimates for the next generation Boeing 787, Airbus 350 and Airbus 380 promise even more improvements in fuel and noise. I suppose we can draw some comfort from the fact that today’s aircraft are clearly more efficient today than the aircraft of 37 years ago. And look, we’re no longer flying the Concorde SST which had an atrocious fuel burn. But concerning the environment, the world today flies a significantly larger number of aircraft each day than were flown back in 1970. Yes, it’s true that we’re moving more passengers over longer distances and at faster speeds. But the unspoken costs to the common community for this mode of transportation are the continued high requirements of limited fossils fuels and the contribution of the fuel burn to global warming. In the Kurt Vonnegut tradition, it might be nice if we could become “unstuck in time“- go back and make a few corrections to the decision making of the past 40 years to steer us on a slightly different course. Those of you who are fans of flight simulation might take at least a little pride in the fact that your hobby helps preserve the environment as compared to real flight. While the manufacturing of computers and computer usage do have an impact on the environment, the impact is not of the same magnitude as the manufacturing and operation of aircraft. So you might consider all types of computer simulation as a modest way to help from further damaging the world around us. On the photography side, we can credit the overwhelming adoption of digital cameras for saving the environment from millions of rolls of film and the required chemicals to develop the the film. In addition to the great quality of digital technology, we benefit from a huge reduction of harmful photographic chemicals. This past week we’ve seen how the activity of a single volcano in remote Iceland demonstrates the fragility of the global environment. The ash clouds produced by the eruption of Eyjafjallajoekull has created a cascade of disruptions in Europe. Not only has air travel been severely affected, but other commercial enterprises such as food suppliers and medical services have suffered. To underline the impact of air travel on the environment I found a study that compares the carbon dioxide emissions from European aircraft operations and the volcano. According to the report, the daily CO2 output from daily aircraft operations is 345,000 tons compared to that of the volcano. I won’t disagree that this may be an unfair comparison – the public benefits from air travel while it’s questionable whether the pubic benefits from the volcano eruption. However, this exercise illustrates one of the costs to society from air travel. As Mr. Vonnegut reiterates from his Slaughterhouse Five, so it goes. For those of you who have the inclination, here are few links to Earth Day sites. ************************************************************************ Author: Arnie Lee, former flower child and President of Abacus *Eyjafjallajokull volcano photo used under creative commons license by Narisa via Flickr. Address any comments about this article, to Arnie via email |
Action Tip #3
11th January 2010
There’s beauty at 30,000 feet and 600 miles per hour. Here’s how I’ve been able to capture some of this beauty when I’m flying way up high.
Up, Up and Away Suggestions
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![]() On an early morning flight we passed over the Rockies. The snow capped peaks make for a great contrast to the dark mountain base. |
![]() Shortly after takeoff, the aircraft passes through the lower layer of clouds on the way to open skies. The sun is starting to peak through the upper layer. |
![]() Here’s another attractive formation in the Rockies. I was lucky to have the warm color of the morning sunrise shed its even light on the mountains. |
![]() There’s beauty closer to the earth too. Here’s a shot of a picturesque river on approach to the Munich Airport. |