The 30,000 Foot Tourist

I just created a new photo set on Flickr, that I'm calling The 30,000 Foot Tourist--it follows a pattern that I have long established on this blog:


I realize that I habitally book the window seat when I'm travelling by plane, and I snap some photos when I'm flying over something interesting. Here's a collection of what I've shot over the years. Natural and man-made features, interesting stuff at airports, stuff like that.

• Awesome shots of New York City--what a photogenic town--from north of Manhattan, showing the Hell Gate Bridge, Triborough, Queensborough, and Roosevelt Island.
  
• Alaskan glaciers, where you can completely see that "river of ice" effect.
  
• A demonstration of the advantage to being short while travelling on airplanes--I can actually stand up under the luggage bins!
  
• A VOR, or VHF Omni-directional Radio Range (a type of radio navigation system for aircraft). They look like somebody made an odd flower sculpture out of softballs--now you know what they are, when you see one.
  
• Other bits of aviation geekery, like the pattern that ice makes on the hub of a propeller
  
• Or winglets--those vertical wing tips that you often see on short-haul planes. They improve fuel efficiency, which seems counterintuitive for adding more stuff to the plane, but the Wikipedia explanation shows that it reduces the size of the wingtip vortices, thus reducing drag. Cool!
  
• I already did a blog post on Boston from the air--the full set is on there.
  
• Washington DC at night
  
• I really like to find neat geographic features that are recognizable from the air--I later identify them via Google Maps. For instance, Pyramid Lake, a reservoir at the California-Nevada Border, Clay's Landing, near Detroit, and Mono Lake, California

Anyway, I keep on wondering if I ever end up in a plane crash, whether I might have the presence of mind to keep snapping pictures on the way down. Hey... it might turn out useful to the crash investigators, right? ("at 18:22, shows that flaps were fully extended..."). If you can identify my body by the Brass Rat + Iron Ring combination, and find the associated SD card, be sure that somebody downloads the card to check. As a warning, I might put the SD card in my wallet--seems like a few more layers might give it a slightly better chance in the fire.