When we had our first winter storm back in October SJC was getting some pretty heft crosswinds making for interesting landings. Here we have a United Express CRJ-700 just about to put one of the mains down on terra firma. Sure it’s no Kai Tak landing but, sadly those are no more.

Shortly after the sun went down this American Airlines MD80 came in on final approach. There were no fires in the area but, the sunset was setting the sky a nice orange. It all came together nicely for this picture.

It took a bit of scrambling to try and get this shot. It’s not like you can ask the pilot a little to the left please. By the time the next plane came through the moon was out of position already.

I recently travelled to Austin and took this picture around sunset. I loved how the light caught the winglet and reflected onto the top of the wing. Unfortunately the outside of the window was a little dirty and you can make out some streaks in the image.

This one was tricky, the sun had already dropped behind the Santa Cruz mountains but, it left a really nice pink sky. I had to shoot at ISO 2500 F/9 to get a 1/160 shutter speed. Fortunately there was not a lot of noise that could not be cleaned up in CS4. I’m very happy with the results.

The weather this past Monday was causing SJC arrivals to use 12R which is the opposite of the normal flow. This made for some nice spotting as the touchdown area was right in front of me and you had a unobstructed view of the complete roll out area. I also got lucky and had both the rear strobe and the lower beacon illuminated when I took the shot.

Often I’m 40 feet underwater in Monterey Bay. In this case I was about 30,000 feet above it. Taken at about 10am in the morning. You can see the Great California Fog Bank retreating from the bay.

This is a older image that I’ve recently given a do over. It’s one of my favorites since the gear is up and the doors are closed. Usually by the time the gear has been retracted, the plane is too far to get a sharp image of it.

This image was my first image accepted to airliners.net so it will always be special to me. It’s also not often that FedEx brings MD-11’s into SJC. Usually it’s a DC-10-10.

It was a nice clear evening up here in northern California giving us a wonderful full moon. Sorry, no aircraft in the shot.