“Sidewinder low level, two ship of Raptors entering at point [static].”

Did I hear that right? The heart begins to race and the mind to wander to whether it could truly be.

Aside from the full lockdown, during which the skies around NYC became eerily quiet, there is always something flying around. Every altitude has its own treasures, and although at times it may seem like the hardest thing to do, keep looking up.

When I think of the many hours spent around the Heathrow perimeter, I had a sense of awe as these beauties launched themselves into the air. Happily snapping away, I realised just how much I enjoyed witnessing these 4-engine beasts.

This puts the uniqueness of the Demo in perspective. "Normally our missions are a lot higher than [the Demo], there's not a lot of times that we are yanking and banking the aircraft down at 200 feet," Syndrome commented. "We push it to the limit on all of our flights...it's pretty insane."

Let’s talk about S-MODE. No no…not the operating system used in your typical Windows computer. We’re talking about the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment. NASA 801, along with two other research aircraft and research vessels, will be outfitted with an array of instrumentation for measuring temperature salinity and ocean velocity across various time and spatial scales.

….., I wasn’t sure it would work. Cue the Shuttleworth collection, based at Old Warden Aerodrome, quickly mobilising to offer a Drive-In airshow, just like the old school Drive-In cinemas. I decided to take a gamble, wanting to support a first of its kind, and an industry that had been severely impacted. With tickets bought, I patiently awaited my first airshow since September 2019.

Sitting quietly at home in our quarantined world I sift through endless photos of airshows and events that in the last year alone created a megapixel jam of unprocessed work. For me, editing work has always been more than just processing an image. There has to be a connection, a theme, or a story. It requires hammering away through cerebral granite. I dig and chip away, piece after piece, layer after layer until it becomes a story worth telling. After digging for months, I tap and hear the sound of the treasure trove of distant memories.

I am by no means a photoshop expert but with all this quarantine time recently, I have had time to dive into photo editing a bit further and have been asked to do tutorials of some of my more in-depth edits, including the heavy blur edits that I do.

…each a glinting tail
across the beams
for the valley, evaporating with navy speed.

We were expertly landed at the aerodrome and the tail wheel settled onto the grass; we taxied back to the apron to shutdown. Even as the engines wound down, I took my time standing up, just enjoying the moment before begrudgingly standing up and stepping down the paratrooper ladder and back to earth. Now was a time to reflect and rehydrate before the afternoon flight with Spitfires.

I wrote this piece for Wings Magazine in 2016; it was the first aviation related piece I'd ever written, and arguably the most resonant aviation memory in my adult life. The impact that this B-17 flight had on my life is still seeing the ripples emanate outward. With the blessing of Wings Magazine, we are again hosting the piece through Full Disc with a singular purpose: to convey the meaning and importance behind warbird rides.

That we’re committed to making great, well made, affordable timepieces that hopefully are a little more than just instruments to tell time. At a moment when time telling is instantaneous and all around us, we hope to make wearable pieces of machinery that tell a story.

In February 2019, the tour sites began to be made public along with more details on the tour. It was immediately apparent that this tour would be much more ambitious than the ’08 visit, as the tour would take the team across the North American continent from Halifax, Nova Scotia at the start to the conclusion at Huntington Beach, CA over a period of 11 weeks. As luck would have it, they were slated to perform at several sites those of us at Full Disc Aviation were already in planning to cover…

I remember being in the game during my junior year, I knew I wanted to go into aviation since I got to West Point, watching the flyover as we ran out onto the field I thought that would be pretty sick to get a chance to do that.

It was another year of back to back weekends, long days, endless drives and adventures, not to mention the thousands of photographs that will provide material for the next decade. For Full Disc Aviation, the highlights of the season were those “first time” shows Seymour Johnson, Beaufort and Chino, or the epics Thunder Over Michigan and Oshkosh. But there were still those “backyard” shows that are “musts and nevermisses".

We made our way across the field with Sam through shin-high grass as Loco taxied the Raptor to the end of the very long runway. It was a hot day, and the heat haze produced a mirage with warbly mirror images of the distant Raptor as Loco slowly repositioned for takeoff. We waited in the calm before the storm, sweating under the mid afternoon sun, until we heard thunder from the far end of the runway.

My first air-to-air sortie was to be an evening shoot with the Military Aviation Museum’s Messerschmitt Bf-109G-4. I had laid eyes on this magnificent machine earlier in the day, it was my first time seeing a 109 and I was beside myself. I spent quite some time alone in the hangar with the 109, familiarizing myself with different angles and aspects I wanted to try and capture.

This past August, the airspace around Ypsilanti MI was taken over by one of the most feared warbirds of WWII. Ypsilanti is home to the Yankee Air Museum, who plays host to the annual Thunder Over Michigan Air Show. The theme for this year was “Corsair Crazy”, and they did not disappoint.

The aircraft technical records show that at 250 hours from new on the 17th August 1970 whilst serving in this Unit, the helicopter was on a recon mission and came under fire at a flight level of 100 feet and 80 knots in South Vietnam and took 11 hits from small arms and automatic weapons.

This serenity would suddenly be broken by a sinister sight in the sky, as the Spitfire’s arch nemesis (or rather a distant relative of that nemesis) as not one but five Hispano Aviacion HA-1112 Buchons lifted off in quick succession, disappearing to form up as the Spitfire formation broke formation and proceeded a well choreographed tail chase in front of the crowd. They would then begin landing one after another, taxying slowly back to their original positions before shutting down.