Planes

Listening to: Singles OST

So I know all of you out there in Blogland are just dying to see the pics from the airshow I went to Auckland for.......mmph, too bad if you don't, its my blog, so there!

I had a wee photographic technique revision before this one, and came away with some much better results.

The morning was dark, almost too dark for good shots. The afternoon was much brighter.

All pics can be clicked to biggify. They've been compressed some so have lost a little sharpness.

Generating sudden areas of low pressure in air can cause the moisture in the air to condense and form clouds, which is exactly what this Hercules is doing with the tips of its 16 propellor blades. A vortex of low pressure is formed by the passage of each blade, and you get this really cool looking corkscrew effect under the right conditions from the condensation:

In real time it looks like a shimmering sort of tubular curtain around each engine.

Bah, I deter your dastardly heat seeker with my flares
The Yak on the left (yes it is called a Yak. Short for Yakovlev, but I'm sure you knew that already) is ahead of the one on the right, in case you were wondering how they can do this sort of thing without running out of planes really quickly:

MX-2 specialised aerobatic plane pulling a few negative G. Very uncomfortable, but amazing to watch. The guy who flies this display has two aircraft. The other one is a Spitfire.

Mustang, Cadillac of the skies etc. Very elegant. Is nice to watch and listen to.

Almost getting arty. Theres another one of those low pressure condensation vortex things coming from the wingtip of the Corsair

USAF C-17 transport, a very big aeroplane doing things very big aeroplanes don't normally do.

Insert 'Ride of the Valkyries' theme music here.

"An RNZAF Orion is currently searching the crowdline"

Purple smoke is the accesory for your Iroquois this season

The Spaghetti Break from the RNZAF aerobatic team. Same sort of separation that the Yaks above do, but on a bigger scale. Its taken me more atttempts than I care to relate to get a decent head on shot of this.

I can relax now

Again, big aeroplanes doing things that big aeroplanes don't normally do:

Australian F-18 generating its own special effects. Yup, vortexes again.

This picture utterly fails to convey just how noisy this was. At full power with afterburner (like here) those two engines can make this aircraft accelerate while going straight up, and combined with the aerodynamics provides for an extremely 'wow' routine. Very Top Gear.

Incidentally the last picture is easily in my personal top 10 of plane pictures I have taken. I'll have to figure out the other 9 and post them sometime.