While cruising through the pics and vids on this site*, I came across this picture of what appears to be a pilot working on his engine in mid-air.
Is this photo real?
If so, anyone know the story?
If not, anyone have any good guesses as to what’s going on here?
Failing that, anyone have any really funny captions for the pic?
*[sub]linked to in this thread.[/sub]
Your site doesn’t support hot links. What is the name of the picture, there are a lot of them.
Hey - has anyone seen my GQ thread?
Oh, here it is, in MPSIMS for some strange reason. Could a mod kindly move this to GQ, where I originally posted it? :dubious:
[sub]OK, I screwed up. A little help here?[/sub]
Oh. Well, I’m just screwing this thread up by the numbers.
Sorry, it’s the pic titled AirMaint.jpg
Just copy the shortcut and paste it into a new window.
I’ve never seen that pic before, but I’m guessing PhotoShop or equivalent. A plane like that could glide a long, long way and no pilot with half a brain would try a stunt like that. There’s the drag of his body, the force of the wind that doesn’t appear to be ruffling his hair, the unbalanced condition with him off to the side like that, and the unlikely situation that anything you could reach without opening the cowling would fix an engine that quit running.
As for a caption: “OK, it’s righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, right??”
There is no way that is real or at least it doesn’t show what it implies. The plane is high up and suitable landing areas are obvious below. It is a light plane and will literally glide for miles and make a perfectly safe landing if the pilot just focuses on flying the plane rather than worrying about the (dead) engine. An engine-off landing isn’t even considered a reportable event to the FAA in most circumstances if there aren’t any injuries. All flight students, including myself, have the instructor just reach over and pull the engine to idle with no warning and no explanation from time to time and then he tells us to figure something out. It isn’t that difficult over any reasonable terrain because available gliding distance literally lets you have your pick many square miles of landing areas.
Glider pilots consider that even more of a non-event because they never even had an engine at all and can even make trips of hundreds of miles. It isn’t that big a deal and no competent pilot would worry about the engine instead of just picking a reasonable place and landing.
I’m not sure that the background is even an aerial shot. It looks like it might be a picture taken on the ground on the edge of a runway, not even photoshopped other than to clean up any shadow of the plane on the ground.
I dunno’, people have done crazier things. The shadows on the ground seem to match those on the plane. The guy looks nearly bald, so I don’t think that’s much help., but his pants seem to be blowing appropriately.
I think it might be genuine.
What do you suppose are the odds that the pilot’s engine would quit, he’d try to fix it, and there’d happen to be somebody in another plane that close by with a camera?
If it’s not Photoshopped, I’d bet it’s staged.
It seems awfully clear for a B&W photo, and the propeller looks like it’s not moving: there isn’t even any blur. I call Photoshop.
I’d bet good money it’s a chop. No pilot worth his license would even consider something as foolhardy as that even ignoring the senselessness of bothering to try and repair the engine when there’s every possibility and opportunity to land safely. Even as a deliberate stunt it’s pretty bland.
Hmmmm! Maybe the prop not turning could explain why he’s out there?
Since there’s no likely way to verify it, these are only opinions anyway.
I wonder if the aircraft is already suspended in some show or something like that, you sometimes see aircraft hung up like that in large exhibitions.
Granted I only have about 275 piloting hours to my credit, and I only have a bachelor’s in aeronautical engineering, but my opinion is that it’s a fake. <shrug>
You might be right. We often form opinions based on our experiences.
When I was a kid I was in the Civil Air Patrol. We would spend a weekend washing and polishing the senior members aircraft, in return they would arrange flights w/ us as passengers. We would receive practical experience in navigation and aircraft handling, often being allowed to take the controls for a short period. Most of us would take our cameras to record our experience. Mid air pics were common.
I also have a former FiL, now in his early 90’s, who spent his entire life earning his living as the owner/pilot of light aircraft, both fixed and rotary wing. He did crop dusting, aerial fire suppression, aerial fish stocking, aerial land surveys, etc. He survived several serious crashes. The stories he’s got to tell are spellbinding and he has snapshots to go w/ many of his tales. While I never heard him tell of doing what’s shown in the OP’s pic, I have heard some things that certainly rivaled that.
I respect your point of view, just remember that it’s not necessarily the definitive one.
Could be real.
Don’t know anything about this specific photo, but if it’s real, it’s not as amazing as what the Key Brothers did. Al and Fred Key set the record for non-stop endurance flight in 1935. They stayed aloft 653 hours, 34 minutes – a record which still stands – in a Curtis J-1. The plane is in the Smithsonian.
They developed the first in-flight refueling system, and they regularly walked out on a special catwalk to service the engine in flight.
It could be real, and here’s why:
That’s a Piper Cub, in which the pilot-in-command sits in the rear seat. You can’t see the rear seat in the photo, so I’m guessing someone is back there flying the airplane. That would leave the passenger, ie: the front seat occupant, free to poke around the engine.
As to whether or not it was staged is another matter. I’d guess it was because, as previously stated in the thread, if you lost the engine you wouldn’t generally monkey around trying to physically fix it. You’d just land.
I popped in here to check the photo and suggest exactly that.
I think it could be real (not necessarily that it is) because there seemed to be a number of ‘stunts’ staged in the first 30-50 years of powered aviation. Wing walkers have a long history. I can imagine some sort of publicity stunt where a ‘wing walker’ gets out of an airplane with the engine off, and makes like he’s working on the engine.
AFAIK the J-3 Cub sis not have a starter; so if the photo is real I imagine they got the shot and the guy crawled back in, and the pilot then made a dead-stick landing.
Incidentally, ISTM that ‘back in the day’ people were less finicky about tying stuff outside of the aircraft. (Not that it has anything to do with the photo.) When I was a kid I got a ride in a J-3. The couple who owned it were camping, and tied all sorts of gear to the struts. (The camping gear had been removed when I went for my ride.)
According to the StudentPilot.com message board, the photo has been around for a long time (and the registratin number has already been re-assigned to a newer plane).
One comment is that the photo predates Photoshop (which does not actually invalidate camera magic which had developed to a fine art using Exacto[sup]®[/sup] knives a many long years ago).
I’m not wholly convinced that the sunlight is in exactly the right position. (Pretty convenient that the plane is over a canal through a desert where there are no trees or towers.) There are two white block buildings where the shadows extending right seem to have been cast by a sun just a bit farther to the left of the photographer than the shadows on the plane might indicate.
Another possibility that occurs to me is a simple staged photo, with an unseen person piloting the plane from the back seat while the pilot steps out just long enough for the photo. (Note that they have plenty of altitude and that the ailerons appear to be just slightly set to roll left, possibly balancing the guy on the starboard side.)
