Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning

How I flew home

Its Paris - after the flight from Valencia. I was somewhat disorganized - landing at Terminal 2 and going to Terminal 1 to get my boarding pass. As us usual with French security, I spent maybe 10 min with the security folks. This time, though, nothing was confiscated. Here, pulling away from the plane - we thought we were going to leave

Ready to leave

Wrong - it started sleeting

More sleet

So we taxi down to the local de-icing spot

Passing the ghost of Concord

Encountering some traffic

And de-icing

These machines are really neat. The guy in the cockpit moves the nozzle in and out and direct the slow of de-icing solution to the appropriate spot. I saw this in Milan the week before. The French variation is that they did not use a headlight that is adjacent to the nozzle

Hovering

De-icing

A small symphony for de-icers

Leaving

Cargo plane landin

landing

touchdown

Then its our turn - takeoff

at 113 M - we fly over a just-arrived flight

At 4821 M we are climbing. Look at the shadow of the plane near the bottom center of the image.

Climbing more at 5917 M

At the initial cruising altitude - 9087 M

A patch of earth in the carpet of clouds

Traffic going to the left

A different plane in the distance traveling to the right and toward us

Closer

Closer

Snow on the ground

Our wonderful SIA ladies

I woke up briefly and saw lights below - we are somewhere over Pakistan

Back to sleep but a 6 am wakeup call to catch the sunrise. We are flying parallel to the Malaysian coast, over Georgetown, Penang etc. Here are a sequence of photos of the sunrise. As usual, the cloud formations made interesting presentations.

The cloud structures vary

Looked at the altimeter - 11933 meters, which must be 12000 meters, our crusing altitude

Now the sun is fully sticking its head above the horizon. But the clouds - just amazing

Here the sun just touches the engine housing

Approaching Singapore

The waiting tankers are not as many as usual

Crossing the coast

over the canal with the MRT workyard to the right

Another view of the MRT work / storage area

The expressway

Our shadow

and home

C. Frank Starmer

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