'When You're A Pilot, You Get All The Good Shots'...

Cool link, Panther. I like his deployment T-shirt artwork. It's apparent that he's a Johnny Cash fan, that verse was recently made more famous by the man in black. Most of the shots seem pretty standard; you've never got shots like that? I guess he really can't publish pics from his airframe. I've had quite a few tanker rides myself. The most memorable one was over the Indian Ocean. I was sleeping in the boom pod on board a KC-135 on it's way back from Afghanistan. The boomer woke me up and made me move over. She ran her checklists and a B-1 slowly slid in from my left. I knew the B-1 crew, and greeted them. They had all been up for about 30 hours and I could actually see their heads lolling around from exhaustion as they struggled to hook up to the boom. Needless to say, the four of them didn't make for any good conversation. I asked how they did up North, and they told me they'd tell me when they pulled away because they were busy. Fair enough. Before they disconnected, they told me to get everyone to the left side of the jet. I looked down for a minute, and I heard the tanker pilot (over my headsets) say "holy sh*t!". I looked up to see the B-1 in full afterburner hanging in knife edge flight next to KC-135. As it started to fall, the aft and intermediate bays popped open to reveal nothing but empty bomb launchers. In our world, we called that a "winchester" The B-1 righted itself and accelerated off. We were still 6 hours from Diego Garcia as the B-1 put serious distance between us. By the time we landed, the B-1's engines were cold and the jet had all of it's covers on. I tried to go visit the crew, but they were asleep already.
 
I love the shot of the sunlight reflecting off the canopy. Nice pictures. Very clean and uncluttered.
 
Yeah Tigisfat,
I had a nice KC-135 ride back in the early 90's.......Too bad I wasn't interested in photography back then like I am now :frown:
 
Cool shots!

Thanks for sharing Panther, He is really an a very good photographer, and can multi-task while flying!

Real Cool link.... :salute:
 
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