Still Amazed Today

This is not an Air France but it is under the Emirates Paint Scheme an A-380 (same type)

This is also an A-380 operated by Qantas and still not an Air France but again, under the paint scheme of Qantas the air frame is still an A-380 my friend! Big! And. it was certainly not around in mid 1950s when I spent those lazy summer days looking up at air plane's contrails, which I still do today! Thank you very much!

My grandmother's were born at a time when the telegraph  (the electromagnetic one of 1832) invented by Samuel Morse; the telephone of Alexander Graham Bell's doings (1839) were all but 50 years old. At the time of my maternal grandmother's death, she had witnessed men walking on the moon. She saw the first cars made by Henry Ford in 1908 as a young girl and I remember when my paternal grandmother and grandfather got their first Westinghouse refrigerator and both my grandparents had telephones in their houses. Although, my maternal grandparents lived next to their grocery store seperated by a wall and a doorway and had a wall handcrank phone I wished that I had today.  I also remember my mom and dad getting our first television in 1952 and we didn't get a color set until 1962. I can remember using the old Translux teletype and getting a newer one with a CPU monitor. It took a half day to have my first cell phone installed in my car's trunk and the hand held portables were the size of the first walkie talkies. Big! I recall my optomologist encouring me to get contact lens when they first came out. I wore them for a staggering 44 years afterwards! I can still see a hawk or an airplane miles away from the cornea molding.

But, most of all, as a young boy, I remember the long hot summers spent sprawled out on the grassy hilltop up the hill one lot from our recently built brick house watching the contrails of jet aircraft (then, not much older than I was at the time) wondering where they were going. I still look up today at jet contrails and wonder where those jets are going, although I do know a bit more about cross-country vectoring today than I did then.

This morning, while checking the images that I had running on the live news feeds from the weekend, I ran across an image from a photographer in Essex ,England, UK. It was an image of a big Airbus A-380's contrail flying over Essex in Southeast England in one of those infamous vectors that airplanes fly. As was reported, the man knew that the A-380 was from Charles deGaulle/Roissy Airport in Paris going to LA here in the states. The contrails were beautiful against a deep blue sky and it reminded me of those summer days as a kid stretched out on that hilltop looking at contrails and wondering were they were going.

Then, it hit me, that today, with the technology at hand, I could look up that flight and see were it was before it even landed. Which I did. That is absolutely amazing for us mortal humans. Yeah, I know. I am reminded all the time that the government has stuff that would rock your socks off, blah blah blah,blah-blah.

Here is the scoop if anyone wants to go look at the live news feed image then get on flightawares or flight radar and  follow what's left of the flight before it lands. I just think it is stunning to see that image and sit down at the computer and find where in the world it is withing a 7-minute delay and where it is going. After all, it is an A-380 and that within and of itself is astonishing.

The images (there are 2) GNF9JX-RM and GNF9kl-RM by Timothy Smith on Alamy.com, click on the live news feed in the search box (images) and scroll down to the live news feed.Sorry, they will roll off the cycle in 48-hours. You can purchase the image while there if you so desire. Mr. Smith would be happy, I'm sure. I would be if my image was purchased from a blog post like this. ☺♪☺♪♫

The flight is that of Air France #66 that left Charles de Gaulle/Roissy at 10:30a.m. CEST en route to Los Angeles International/LAX with arrival due at 12:06pmPDT 30th August 2016. It is a daily flight. That is why they call it scheduled airlines ♪☺☺♪.

The flight was at 40,000 feet at 490kts air speed or just call it .85mock. Anything over 600 MPH is pegged as mock speed anyway. Or so, I am told by those who know such things and remind me that MPH is a thing of the past. AARGH!!!!

So, not only is it amazing that one can figure out these things....it is most amazing that now, I have proven that a dream of a child's wondering of where that contrail is going can know be known thanks to a guy totally unknown to me on a different continent than myself, taking a picture of an airplanes contrail and having the know how to post it on a live news feed that I use myself. And where now I can this 30th August 2016 finally answer that question and dream of my childhood many years ago.

I must say, however, that not knowing where that plane I watched as a child was going 60 years ago was awesome then, as it still is today, but knowing today is still a childhood dream as it was then.That will never change and I am glad of that fact.

 

Honey Salvadori-- Hits a Home Run

"I think a photography class should be a requirement in all educational programs because it makes you see the world rather than just look at it." -- Author unknown

"Citizen journalism is about being in the right place at the right time." --Honey Salvadori

"Professional photography is about having the insight and analysis to know how to report a story and get beyond the superficial."  --Honey Salvadori

 Yesterday, over 2100 viewers submitted their photos to a local Fox News station. More yet came into the archives of the ABC and NBC and CBS affiliates.

But the real story did not come from the network affiliates rather, they came from the TxDot cameras that the affiliates aired or were pulled up on personal computers, notebooks and iphones in the hands of individuals. First came a day of sleet, freezing fog, mixed with freezing rain. That was a typical Texas nightmare on the roads. The next day came the light, fluffy, powder dry snow fall. That was just a pure nighmarish experience amplified.

Even the television stations put their "Reed Timmer" type "Intimedator" trucks on the road. Driving from miles south to miles north of the metroplex only to find that the 40-car pileup was only 17-car and later confirmed to be 15 cars total. Well, I guess if you count the two semi-tractor trailer rigs in the mess, the 17 number would hold water. But the TxDot cameras were the thing to watch. Seeing adult men and women on 2-3-4 and even 5 high tier flyways stuck-- get out of their cars-- and walk around on the roadways of major interstate highways was insane. To make things even more insane was to see cars turn around on the ramps and drive in the opposite direction thinking that they were going to get down and out of their current situation. Even police cars. Others, just choose to put their cars in reverse and back down the ramps with on-coming traffic coming at them.

Nothing proved to me more about how to spend federal highway dollars more usefully than this past Friday afternoon at the movies watching all that unfold. What needs to settle over any area that has traffic problems albeit congestion, winter weather, tornados, floods, hurricane, sandstorms or landslides is a massive educational program. It is obvious that there is little common in common sense. Too many school children have been graduated with 12-years of political correctness, wording of the pledge of allegiance, bringing cupcakes to school, dress codes, not allowed to bring medication and turn it over to the school nurse, or which teacher should be allowed to carry a handgun rather than teaching the basic reading, {W}riting and {A}rithmetic in school.

No one can get beyond the superficial anymore. One can have all the insight that there is to have but unless there is a fundamental element of not just having a degree but have a whole lot more  (and I mean more) thought of insight as to what to do with it once it is awarded, society becomes  more diluted. We really are not as smart as we think we are. It's a falsehood of education, big time. Take the teacher that must use her own money to buy supplies for her class verses the coach at the school that doesn't have to worry about outfitting his team with the latest fashions from feet to head and top to bottom. What is wrong with our educational system? How did we get so far off the basics?

I didn't have to use a single expressway ramp!!

I haven't been as cold talking pictures as I was with this one!

It's a known fact that photography sharpens and trains the eye. A photographer begins to look at the world much differently later on than early on, but it all starts at the very beginning of picking up a camera and looking through the view finder. As Honey said in her interview with Alamy, "citizen journalism is being in the right place at the right time", but seeing what you actually see, is a learned experience that most of us Americans are missing, while the rest of the world is not.

02March2015: corrected a previously edited sentence that did not remove the old error but incorporated it in the new correction.  "It's a known fact that photography training the eye." It should have read: "It's a known fact that photograph sharpens and trains the eye."