Aircraft and Airports

This is the famed "Aeroplane Bar" in Olomouc. It is in fact a genuine Tupolev Tu-104 airliner, the first successful design of jet airliner in history, as the very first jet airliner, the De Havilland D.H.106 Comet, had an unpleasant habit of blowing up in flight. It was also the first jet airliner built in the Communist bloc, and not to be outdone, Boeing introduced the 707 a few years later, finally giving the west an airliner to be proud of. In any case, this Tu-104 will unlikely ever fly again, as it's well....a bar, and in any case one of the wings is smashed at the tip.

This technically bad, blurred, photo was shot from a train, as this was about the only chance I got to see Tempelhof, and I didn't want to pass it up. As Wikipedia says, "Designated by the ministry of transportation on October 8, 1923, Tempelhof is the world's oldest commercial airport, and the world's first airport being connected to a subway-network in 1927." That's something very impressive to me, especially when you consider that it was also the first with restaurants and shops like modern airports, all 25 years before the first jet airliners. It has long enough runways to take 747 jumbo jets, but aircraft visiting Tempelhof are often expected to taxi under certain overhead bridges in the airport that were constructed long before aircraft got so large, so today most planes using Tempelhof are very small by the standards of modern airliners, and there has been talk of closing the airport. I hope myself that it will survive as a museum, and I would support any such effort to preserve it.

The captain of the plane told us to look out the window because Cape Cod was off to our left, and luckily I had a window seat.

We were flying over Boston at FL350, actually, so that illustrates the distance that you can see from that altitude, as if you looked straight you could see Cape Cod, and if you looked down, as here, you could see Boston!!

A few minutes later I was able to zoom in and get a better angle on Cape Cod.

As we continued down the coast of the U.S. towards New York, the lighting and the clouds, I thought, provided ideal opportunities for photography, even if my window was icing up a bit.

This was better than Picture 1, I thought, since I zoomed and angled it better.

This was an edit of Picture 2, obviously. I'm hoping that this improved it somewhat, but I posted both just to see what all of you thought.

I have surprisingly few photos of New York City and its surroundings considering how often I fly through there. I also grew up regularly travelling through New York City, although I've never lived there.