Inspired by our March 2016 cover story by James Fallows, “How America Is Putting Itself Back Together,” readers share their best aerial photos from across the U.S. Submit your own via hello@theatlantic.com. (Please provide the location, the story behind the photo, and the largest file size you have. Horizontal photos with a bit of the plane visible—a wing, the edge of a window—are ideal. Terms and Conditions here.)
So, this company decided to offer tours of San Francisco with zeppelins. They invited me and a bunch of journalists for the inauguration trip. But here’s the thing: Are you familiar with all the stuff they say about San Francisco and the wind? Those stories are true … the inaugural trip had been postponed for three months, on a daily basis—you know, wind—and the €600 tickets for the general public were refunded in full and the company went out of business in six months. Pictures were cool, tho.
I love this one of a scuttled ship, especially when juxtaposed with the shadow of the airship above:
Cristiano Valli
When I asked Cristiano about the vessels, he replied:
The bay is shallow, so there’s a lot of sunken ships, but they’re just too expensive to recover, especially around Alameda Island. I don’t think there’s any historical value, just life happens in the bay ...
If you have an aerial photo of your own and an anecdote to share, we’d love to post: hello@theatlantic.com. Submission guidelines here.
This photo was taken leaning out the open side window of a Cessna 172. The date is July 15, 2013, and I was participating in a “day in the life of Oregon” photography project called Project Dayshoot+30. Thirty years to the day before this shot was taken, a group of photographers had captured images from around Oregon on July 15, 1983, and a reprise of the project was organized in 2013 to commemorate the original venture.
This is a photo of a tree and plant nursery near the town of Monmouth, in the Willamette Valley south of Portland. The time is approximately 8:15 PM, and the midsummer sun is finally starting to set, nicely capturing the spray of irrigation spigots on the colorful plants.
This shot is special to me for many reasons. It reminds me of the natural beauty of my home state of Oregon and of the importance of the Willamette Valley to the history of the U.S. It is also special because of the wonderful day my father and I had shooting photos of Oregon from the air. Dad was in the back seat of the airplane, and my friend Jill Smith was next to me in the co-pilot seat. We finished our journey after dark at Troutdale Airport, my home field, just outside of Portland, where we had begun before dawn that morning. We were exhausted but joyful.
Have a good aerial photo to share? Please send our way. The latest from a reader:
Hi! I’m submitting an aerial photograph of the Twin Span Bridge, which stretches across Lake Pontchartrain, connecting New Orleans and the neighboring town of Slidell. I took this on my first (and only, so far) flying lesson a few months ago. We flew out of the New Orleans Lakefront Airport, which was built in the 1930s on top of a manmade peninsula overlooking the lake.
I drove across the eastbound span of the Twin Span Bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, and parts of the westbound span of the bridge were simply gone. I drove an hour through a destroyed forest, and when I looked up in the sky, I tried to imagine a thing so big that it could destroy so much.
Our reader Evan asked, “Any chance of a repeat, since this series still seems to be going strong?” Yes indeed—please send us your aerial pics even if you’ve submitted one already. Evan’s previous America by Air is here. His current caption:
This photo was taken from a Piper PA-28-161 Warrior just off the coast of San Diego, showing Torrey Pines golf course to the right and Torrey Pines State Park further up the coast. The beach below the golf course, Black’s Beach, is informally a nude beach, although the resolution on this shot is nowhere near high enough to require any reader warnings.
The location of this shot is roughly next to the flag for Torrey Pines Golf Course and the glider symbol (marking a “gliderport” for launching hang gliders and parasails to soar along the bluffs) in this map. The dark blue polygons show the Class B airspace, which in this case starts at 1800' for military aircraft departing out of MCAS Miramar and again at 6800' for airliners arriving into Lindbergh Field. On a VFR sightseeing flight on a nice day, pilots can stay below the class B airspace like I do here and use the air-to-air frequency to talk to and help look out for any other aircraft in the area.
Black’s Beach in San Diego is the one of the largest nude beaches in the United States and is popular with Southern Californian nudists and naturists. Originally including the current Torrey Pines State Beach, Black’s Beach was the first and only public nude beach in the country for several years in the mid-1970s. Because Black’s Beach was traditionally recognized as a clothing optional beach, nudity is tolerated for the portion of the beach that is managed by the state park.
Black’s Beach was named for the Black family who had a horse farm overlooking the beach. They sold the land, and then it was subdivided into La Jolla Farms lots. The Farms’ residents retained the Black family’s private road to the beach.
Black’s has its own website here, for all you prurient readers out there.
If y’all are getting into “videos from your airplane window,” this timelapse cockpit-view of an LAX landing at twilight made the rounds a few years ago, but is as spectacular as ever.
The soundtrack does it no favors, though. So I recommend syncing the video with The Fall’s shadowy, glamorous “L.A.”:
It fits perfectly.
He’s right, and you can mute the top video and un-mute the bottom one to sync them up. If you have an aerial timelapse of your own, please send it our way: hello@theatlantic.com. Here’s a great example on Instagram I spotted this week from a friend of mine, Dayo Olopade, flying into San Francisco’s SFO.
Now that our aerial feature has grown to include videos, I figured I’d throw a new medium in the mix: I snagged this (cinemagraph? Boomerang?) short video back in 2015:
That bright part on the righthand side? That’s Downtown Los Angeles. Here’s another grab from the same flight, as the plane neared landing at LAX:
This flight path never gets old, and the sheer amount of L.A. sprawl astonishes me. I love how there are speckles of light in every direction, like endless constellations in the night sky. (Of course, the actual constellations are blocked by the city’s smog.) As the band Thirty Seconds To Mars put it in their 2013 song, Los Angeles is truly “the land of a billion lights.”
A pristine view of the city’s waterfront comes from reader Edward:
I started taking airplane photos in earnest about five years ago when it dawned on me that people, including myself, were numb to the wonders of flying. It has become a rather unpleasant ordeal in the last 15 years or so, but the wonders that speed by still amaze.
I shoot most of my window seat photos with an infrared modified camera, which helps cut through the inevitable haze at 30K+ feet. It gives a unique look, and I’ve included one sample to give you an idea (on approach to LAX). The other is a more conventional color photo over Miami, Florida.
But how colorful it is! Here’s a less scenic but still really cool shot of Miami from another mid-flight reader. Send your own, as always, to hello@.
Stu Smith captured one halo rainbow for us a few months ago, but now Alan ups the ante:
Here’s a photo for your consideration: a nice double rainbow during our departure out of Philadelphia the other day, with the Delaware River below. Always remember to look out the window …
Our guidelines for the series recommend photos taken low enough to see detail on the ground, but this 30,000-foot view is simply too striking not to post:
This photo from reader Brian Neil doesn’t have a part of the aircraft in the frame but it makes the view all the more surreal. Here’s Brian with details and a bonus pic:
My friend Tom took this photo during a flight over San Francisco while I piloted a Cessna 172. The fog in SF has always been one of its most interesting features, and I love days when it partially covers the city. Sutro Tower gets to lord over the fog all the time, but it’s not common for it to reach downtown like this:
Jessica Placzek at KQED, a public radio station in San Francisco, profiled the Sutro Tower last summer:
Back in the 1960s, San Francisco had really bad television reception. By many accounts, it was the worst of any city in America. Good reception required a clear line of sight from the broadcast tower to your TV antenna, and in hilly San Francisco this was a challenge. Broadcasters began the hunt for a location to build a very tall tower that could send a clear TV signal far and wide. [...]
Eric Dausman, general manager of Sutro Tower, says the architect’s decision to taper the center was entirely aesthetic. “All the engineers since then want to shoot him. It made it a more difficult structure to maintain, and it is a more difficult structure to keep perfectly upright and in a great condition,” says Dausman.
The other major change was the color. Original plans showed a tower with a golden hue, but aviation regulations required the tower be painted alternating stripes of red and white to ward off possible plane collisions.
San Francisco writer Herb Caen once wrote, “I keep waiting for it to stalk down the hill and attack the Golden Gate Bridge.” Acknowledging both displeasure and affection for its undeniable prominence on the city's skyline, it is sometimes referred to light-heartedly as the Sutro Monster or Space Claw.
For some aerial views from the tower, check out this great video from KQED narrated by Placzek:
Update from a reader who lived in San Francisco for a while:
This isn’t a submission because it’s a photo from the ground not the air, but since I’m a Sutro appreciator, I am sharing a photo of the Sutro Monster I took that I really like:
Sutro seems to be using the fog to sneak up on an unsuspecting city. Attached. Sutro Tower even has a fan site, run by a Floridian. I sent in that photo years ago and it is now one of the many used on the page.
Early evening over Antrim County, Michigan, back in April 2008, following departure from the Antrim Co. Airport (KACB) on Runway 2. Intermediate Lake is in the foreground and Lake Bellaire is in the upper right of the photo. The small town of Bellaire (pop. approx. 1080) is visible between the airport and Lake Bellaire.
After spending 40 years as a pilot based in Michigan, I have quite a few more photos. I’ll be happy to send more if you’re interested.
Yes please. And if you have one yourself, even if you’ve had a photo posted already, please send to hello@theatlantic.com.
This was taken in a Cessna 172 in early August 2015. The location is near Kalamazoo, Michigan, looking west at around 5500 MSL. I loved how the low sun was reflecting off of Lake Michigan and also filtering through the clouds.