It took several tries and much reworking of schedules to finally capture the images in " Turbine Pilot: Encore! Encore!" (see p. 102) by photographer Mike Fizer. "Scheduling the Citation Encore — or any higher-end aircraft — can be a chore. Its availability, my schedule, and the weather all can conspire against me." For this shoot, Fizer had initially planned to photograph the Encore in Wichita on February 21. Bad weather. So he drove to another assignment in Dallas. The weather improved. So he drove back to Wichita. Bad weather. He shot the interiors — "interiors look good on overcast days," he says, and rescheduled again. Finally at 6 a.m. on March 19 the shoot was under way — but the heavy overcast forced the air-to-air photography formation above the layers of soup. The exteriors were then rescheduled for the following day. Whew. We're sure you'll appreciate the effort.
Author and historian Bruce Frazer strives to weave together human interest and technical accuracy. "This means conducting the best possible research and interviewing participants whenever possible," he says. His article, " Too Tired to Fly?" (see page 109), is a good example. AOPA's information resource coordinator, Robert Fisher, and links on the AOPA home page led him to numerous info-rich sources. But it was "old-fashioned networking" that yielded interviews with a world authority on sleeplessness, Professor David Dinges, and Voyager pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. The lead illustration for "Too Tired to Fly" is a painting by artist Mike Wimmer that originally appeared in the children's book Flight: The Journey of Charles Lindbergh by Robert Burleigh.
When freelance writer and photographer Tim Wright suggested this month's " Postcards: Flying Over Time" (see page 117), he knew he had two challenges. The first, he says, was how to make the subject focused enough to fit into a magazine story. The second was how to do it accurately. "To do both, I needed help, and thank goodness I found Tom Poe. Acting as my guide and my teacher, Tom taught me more about the war than any history class I ever attended. Circling The Wilderness battlefield near Fredericksburg, listening to Tom, the horror of the Civil War was never so clear in my mind. For me, it was a true epiphany."
Editor in Chief Tom Haines has flown general aviation airplanes throughout the world and virtually everywhere in the United States — except the mountain states, so the trip to Denver to fly the Cirrus SR22 for this month's cover story, " Cirrus SR22: Power Broker" (see page 78), was a real treat. "I've flown across the country on a number of occasions, but always to the south, crossing the mountains between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. This was my first GA flight along the Front Range. Snuggling up within a couple of miles of Long's Peak at 14,200 feet during the photo mission proved to be a real challenge, thanks to some early morning turbulence, but the views were worth it. And the results speak for themselves."
Related Articles
