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The Pilots in ActionThe images presented here were taken in late July, 1999, when I went to visit my friend David in California. Even though we only went out flying twice during my visit, we did a lot of flying. Especially Dave. Most of the shots we got were of our airplanes, but I thought I would throw a few shots in that included us - the guys behind the controls. Fortunately, a few of Dave's family members were around to operate the video camera, or we wouldn't have any pictures of us. |
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That's me on the left, and Dave on the right. We don't ordinarily find ourselves in a pose like this,
but someone holding a video camera walked up to us and said, "hey, look over here!" So there we are. That's my Eagle II that Dave is helping me prepare for flight. I usually manage to survive about a year before I have to go out to visit the master again to have him tell me what's wrong with my plane. On this trip, he did some work on a couple of my engines, so I put it in his capable hands to get this engine running before I flew the plane. |
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And there's me, enjoying my first flight of the day (or was it my second? Or my third? Fourth???). I'm just enjoying flying my plane! What I can see of it, anyway. I was really wishing that I got my hair cut before leaving Arizona (especially before flying). |
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Sometimes, flying from the ground isn't quite satisfying enough. This was an attempt to get just a little closer to my plane...especially as I performed some very low, close fly-by maneuvers (not shown). I was standing on a sort of metal stool that is a permanent fixture out at the flying field where we flew. |
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The sky just isn't right until both our Eagles are in it. Here's a definitive shot of the two of us doing some formation flying. An interesting distinction I have noticed between Dave and myself is that I tend to fly with my transmitter antenna held vertically, whereas Dave flys with his antenna held more or less horizontally. |
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Here's another shot of our Eagles flying together at dusk. |
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And here's a pretty good shot of our planes in close formation. We actually managed to get the planes a lot closer to each other a few times. In fact, the last time we attempted to fly formation, the planes came so close that we decided to call it quits for formation flying for a while. |
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Since the formation flying story has a happy ending, here is the proverbial flight into the sunset. That's my Eagle in the picture. The sun was actually a huge bright red ball in the sky (like a giant super-bright LED), but the camera was unable to capture the essence of the foreboding sky. |