All work and no play?

Mark had asked me last week if I had any good pictures of the King Air with a sunset or something like that to put on a Flying Mission Christmas card that he’s making. I didn’t really, but in talking about it, he mentioned that what he really wanted was some shots of the King Air in flight. I didn’t think much of it, but a few days later we had a day with a nice solid overcast layer (which is very rare around here) and Mark made a spur-of-the-moment decision that we would go up and take some pictures of the King Air, using a 210 as the photo plane. So we called Stefan, our resident photographer, to see if he could come. Stefan was giddy at the opportunity both to fly and to take air-to-air pictures, so he begged off of the work that was planned for him at the office and came out to the airport as quickly as he could. I flew the 210 as the photo plane (and the lead plane of the formation) and Dan flew the King Air. It was the first time that I had really done any formation flying, and it was a lot of fun. We first buzzed along under the clouds and took a few shots against the ground and the horizon, and then climbed up through the clouds and took some shots on top of the solid cloud layer in the sun. We wasted a lot of time trying to find each other after coming up through the clouds and then rejoining formation after a few of the maneuvers, I think mostly because both Dan and I were fairly inexperienced with formation flying. I didn’t help that the King Air is pretty slippery and was hard to get slowed down to match speeds after Dan caught up with us. We flew for a bit over an hour, and Stefan ended up with about 1,200 pictures. A few of those turned out pretty nicely, and I’ll post a few here for your viewing enjoyment as soon as I pilfer them from Stefan. It was a great experience, and it was fun to be able to get up and mess around a bit doing something out of the usual routine.