On Wednesday night of this week, Deb Fallows and I are doing a program at Washington's historic Sixth and I synagogue, in conversation with the Atlantic's editor-in-chief James Bennet. We'll be talking about about our American Futures project of learning about smaller American towns that are coping with economic or social dislocations.
If you're in Washington, please come by!
This evening I was looking through some of the pictures we have taken on these travels, to choose a few for a pre-program display. In the process I found some videos I hadn't been aware of, which Deb had taken from the right seat of the Cirrus SR-22 as we were flying around.
For an introduction to the concept of how the world looks different from 2,500 feet up, compared with either ground level or an airline altitude somewhere above 30,000 feet, here are a few minutes from the beginning and end of one flight. The first clip shows taxi and takeoff from runway 33 at KBTV, in Burlington, Vermont. About 35 seconds in you can see a big solar-panel array to the right of the runway. Then we head over Lake Champlain before turning left, toward the south.
The second clip is about two hours later, as we were coming in for landing on runway 32 at KGAI, Montgomery County Airpark in Gaithersburg, Maryland, outside Washington. In the first 30 seconds you can see the runway off to the right, as we take a wide "right base" leg toward the airport. The plane then turns right to land.
Neither of these is offered as a pro-level video; they were opportunistic pictures Deb took en route. But they may give an idea of the sense of 3-D swimming through space that comes with small plane flight. Also the background engine noise gives an idea of why we wear headsets in the plane, as indicated right at the end of the second clip.
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