Ben's Air Blog

--> The Airbus A310 is a twin-engine medium to long range wide-body aircraft built in the 1980s and 1990s as a shortened version of Airbus’ first aircraft, the A300.  Throughout years of service with world’s major airlines, such as Lufthansa, Singapore, and Pan Am, I never got to fly in an A310.  As time progressed, the 255 A310s built slowly transitioned to secondary airlines, cargo carriers, and various Air Forces around the world.  Short of sending myself in a FedEx package, or flying on an exotic airline such as Ariana Afghan, Biman Bangladesh, or MIAT Mongolian ( see full list of current A310 operators ), there was one last easy way for me to log an A310: an airline in Canada called Air Transat was still operating an 11-strong fleet of A310s.  With Air Transat retiring these ‘buses in 2013, I had to start looking at flying it soon.

--> Farmers Airship (Airship Ventures) Zeppelin NT N07 Eureka (registered N704LZ, c/n 04), based at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, is one of only two Zeppelin dirigibles operating in the world today ( the other is based in Germany in Friedrichshafen on the shores of Lake Constance, the home of Zeppelin).

  Where is Waldo? I rarely have my photo taken when I am taking photos. But with cameras all around me documenting everything, I was bound to end up in an official NASA photograph. In fact, I got into five photos and one video!

  Déjà Vu I returned to the KSC Press Site at launch minus one day. It was déjà vu. We don’t get too many “do overs” in photography. For at least some aspects of this event – I was getting a do over.

No one ever said photographing a shuttle launch would be easy, nor did I expect that it would be. I should know. After all, I have worked in the space industry for the last 16 years – some of those years with the shuttle program – and launch delays are part of the business. But until I got my feet on the ground, I never realized how frustrating it would be. Frustrating. Yes, that pretty much sums it up.