Plane Pictures
57 images Created 30 Oct 2008
With aviation top of the agenda in climate change debates, this project about flying culture was shot to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Orville Wright's first flight in 1903.
Most people have been in a plane at one time or another - wherever you live you have seen a plane fly over you. Aviation is an unavoidable part of our daily life, an essentially positive force that has enabled man to confound one of the fundamental laws of quantum physics - it has made the world a smaller place.
One thing is for certain. Whatever the reason, be it fear, curiosity or affection, when a plane passes overhead, most of us look up.
Aerospace is a magnet for misfits and dreamers - myself included, to the extent that it has been my passion since childhood. The VC10 that took me to Africa more than conveyed a 10 year-old schoolboy to a far-flung airfield to visit his brother. Any flight in any machine and I am that 10 year-old again!
Today, the 120 ft that the Wright brothers' 'Flyer' aeroplane flew is the length of a 747's economy cabin. Yet only 10 years after Kitty Hawk, Fokker Triplanes buzzed the Western Front in the first dog fights where silk scarves and salutes punctuated a coup de grace. Thirty years on, the jet became of age and after a second world war, men flew faster than sound; Twenty more years and a Superpower excreted high-explosive from their bombers' bellies upon simple villagers.
Aviation has sadly become part of a throw-away society and once-majestic flying machines rest in fields, drizzly aerodromes and vast parking places in the dry Mojave Desert: After a hundred years, it's own success has demoted a golden age of air travel to that of undignified scrap.
(More text available on request).
Most people have been in a plane at one time or another - wherever you live you have seen a plane fly over you. Aviation is an unavoidable part of our daily life, an essentially positive force that has enabled man to confound one of the fundamental laws of quantum physics - it has made the world a smaller place.
One thing is for certain. Whatever the reason, be it fear, curiosity or affection, when a plane passes overhead, most of us look up.
Aerospace is a magnet for misfits and dreamers - myself included, to the extent that it has been my passion since childhood. The VC10 that took me to Africa more than conveyed a 10 year-old schoolboy to a far-flung airfield to visit his brother. Any flight in any machine and I am that 10 year-old again!
Today, the 120 ft that the Wright brothers' 'Flyer' aeroplane flew is the length of a 747's economy cabin. Yet only 10 years after Kitty Hawk, Fokker Triplanes buzzed the Western Front in the first dog fights where silk scarves and salutes punctuated a coup de grace. Thirty years on, the jet became of age and after a second world war, men flew faster than sound; Twenty more years and a Superpower excreted high-explosive from their bombers' bellies upon simple villagers.
Aviation has sadly become part of a throw-away society and once-majestic flying machines rest in fields, drizzly aerodromes and vast parking places in the dry Mojave Desert: After a hundred years, it's own success has demoted a golden age of air travel to that of undignified scrap.
(More text available on request).
