Aeroplanes Under Grey Skies

Made the 250 mile round trip to a local(ish) air museum today. Decided I'd go out there with e medium format camera and hope for some interesting clouds. Sadly the interesting clouds that I drove under for most of the journey turned to plate grey by the time I arrived.

The shot below looks like one of those monochromes with some color retained (as Steve says, the 'red dress' effect) but it's actually all color. A natural metal finish North American F-100C Super Sabre under flat grey skies. In fact this particular aircraft was the first production F-100C but, in fact, it never made it into Air Force service. It was used Edwards AFB with NACA (the forerunner of NASA) then moved to Ames at Moffett Field then to San Jose airport for the San Jose State University. Once they were done with it it was loaned to Castle Museum. It's current paint job shows an aeroplane from the 531st Tactical Fighter Squadron of the 21st Tactical Fighter Wing basd at Misawa AB, Japan.

Shot on Leaf Aptus 75, processed in Aperture with a little help from Nik plug-ins.



This shot is monochrome. A Lockheed P-80B Shooting Star, the first type of fighter jet in the US Air Force. This one is painted in the markings of Lt. Russell Brown who is credited with the first ever jet-to-jet 'kill' on November 8, 1950 over Korea.



Thought I'd add in a third. A McDonnell F-101B Voodoo. An astounding plane that first flew in 1954. It's twin -engined grunt could take it up to Mach 1.7 and it set a number of speed and point-to-point records. Some F-101B's saw service with the Air National Guard until 1982 - a remarkable service record.