Hanging out of an Airplane

A few days ago I was strapped into the back of an airplane with the door removed. I had my climbing harness on and was anchored to three attachment points in the back of a Piper Cub. Dressed in a down jacket with windproof gloves and a face mask we took off to test out our system for photographing mountain terrain in the Sangre de Christo mountains above Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I was on a test flight with a friend of mine, Jerry Van Slambrook, who is an excellent pilot and is also very experienced at flying in big mountains. We are working on a project to photograph some Colorado peaks from the air. I can't reveal the full nature of the project just yet but it will be really fun to work on and should result in some wild images. I just thought I'd share a few of the test images here as it was a pretty cool experience and I am really looking forward to working on this project some more.


The best part of the day was when Jerry rolled the plane over so that I was looking down past my feet directly at the ground several hundred feet below us. All in all though it was pretty casual. Breaking the plane of the doorway was a little harsh since we were going over a hundred miles per hour but I was very comfortable having hung off 3,000 foot cliffs on several occasions. More to come on this project. Stay tuned.