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AIRCRAFT PHOTOGRAPHY: anyone else want to participate?

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Looked like the type of company that offers “the experience” to the big wallets willing to shell out for it.

Congrats to you on finding an interesting and rewarding job!

Our customer has the deepest pockets--courtesy of the US taxpayers. We're contracted to fly an aggressor role against Uncle Sam's pilots.

Our job is to teach the young buck military pilots that despite having vastly superior aircraft, they can still lose badly when they come up against an experienced adversary. Our corporate motto is опыт важен (Russian for Experience Matters)

(thanks for the congrats--this job is a dream come true for me. At 53, I'm getting to re-live my 20s.....I can still do the work, but I can't drink all night and work a 12 hr shift like I used to)
 
Yakolev Yak-18T. It was the only one in New Zealand at the time I went for a few rides in it about ten ten years ago.

A friend of a pilot friend of mine brought it and she taught him to fly it. I got used as ballast a few times.

At the time no-one in NZ had a rating to fly one, so my friend and another senior instructor took it for a flight and rated each other on it.

Because it was the only one in NZ and not then on the civil approved lists, it had to have the yellow sticker.

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And there she is post exit seen through the risers.

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Don't know if you are still jumping, but with the MC-6 ALWAYS land with toggles all the way up. Do not try to match wind speed EVER.

Hard won experience and has resulted in one broken leg and one permanently screwed up ankle for me and my friend. PM if you need more info.
 
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Don't know if you are still jumping, but with the MC-6 ALWAYS land with toggles all the way up. Do not try to match wind speed EVER.

Hard won experience and has resulted in one broken leg and one permanently screwed up ankle for me and my friend. PM if you need more info.
Watched a guy “run” with the wind using one, and smack into the front of an LMTV.
 
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Just short of the runway, Hurlburt Field, 1989. Tried to land in Florida thunderstorms. A couple months later, I'm returning from a deployment to Panama or Honduras (I forget) on a 141. Loadmaster says we're on final about 20 minutes out. Thirty minutes later I ask him, WTF. He said we were diverting to GA due to thunderstorms.
 
Don't know if you are still jumping, but with the MC-6 ALWAYS land with toggles all the way up. Do not try to match wind speed EVER.

Hard won experience and has resulted in one broken leg and one permanently screwed up ankle for me and my friend. PM if you need more info.


Still jumping when my body lets me, had a rash of injuries hit just prior to jump ops the last year. That pic was an SF-10A. Super responsive rig.
 
Here's a few pics of the Nine-O-Nine, the B-17 that crashed a few years ago.













I was in line to get on it about a week before she crashed, I was on the phone with my dad and he kept saying “ I really wish you wouldn’t get on that old plane, that thing is old and anything could happen…”. Finally let him talk me out of it… bout a week later it crashed and killed all them folks… terrible.
 
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