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.)
A reader in New Jersey, Roger Zaruba, recently emailed a submission for our aerial series:
Here’s a photo taken on a sunrise trip for fuel from Essex County Airport to Central Jersey Airport in New Jersey. The view is south of Newark looking east over New York Bay and Sandy Hook out to the Atlantic Ocean from about 10 miles inland. Altitude was 2500 feet in a Cessna 182.
Unfortunately the file size for that evening shot was too small to properly post, so I asked Roger if he has a larger version. Today he replied in spades:
I went out this morning to do a little air-work and take some new pictures with my Galaxy S4. The shots are about ten times the size of the other one and I hope they are usable.
Very usable, so I sequenced several of Roger’s fantastic photos with his flight details:
I took off from Essex County (KCDW) a hair after 0600 and headed northwest towards Greenwood Lake Airport and Greenwood Lake on the NJ/NYS border between 2500 and 3000 feet MSL.
Pinecliff Lake, just southwest of Greenwood Lake
Then I headed northwest to the onion fields, a rather well-known farming area at the NW corner of NJ going into NYS. You can see NY, NJ, and well into PA.
Onion Fields
Then I headed back home and took the shots looking SE towards NYC, and finally some contrail shots from my tie-down.
Greenwood Lake Airport
Roger adds, “I took a clip of my ADS-B flight path on FlightAware so you could see where I went”:
It kinda looks like a guy hiking with a walking stick. If you have any flight patterns of your own, accompanied with some aerial shots, please send them our way: hello@theatlantic.com.
Here’s a wintry scene you don’t usually associate with the red rocks of the country’s biggest canyon:
Jordan Kinsley
Looking NW over fresh snowfall on the Grand Canyon from 40,000 ft on January 12. A sliver of the nose of the Boeing 737, including my windshield wiper, in the foreground.
Perusing the Atlantic archives for other scenes from the Grand Canyon, I came across a great passage from Peter Davison in our October 1997 issue. It’s from his travel piece on Sedona, Arizona, the scenic town south of the canyon:
Landscape on the Arizona scale challenges the resources of human speech; it beggared [novelist Zane] Grey, who had to resort to stilted terms from the construction industry to describe the mighty cliffs of the Grand Canyon: “Turrets, mesas, domes, parapets, and escarpments gave the appearance of an architectural work of giant hands.” To use such language for the vastness of these badlands is to commend the horse in the lingo of the horsefly. There’s an old story that a priest and a cowboy arrived together at the canyon’s North Rim and stood silent a while. Finally the priest fell upon his knees and exclaimed, “O Lord, how wonderful are thy works!” The cowboy ruminated, spat, and muttered, “Don’t it beat hell?”
If you’ve captured your own aerial view of the Grand Canyon, or nearby Sedona, with part of the plane within the camera’s frame, please drop us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
Hello! I saw your request for a picture from Minnesota and was excited because I was getting on a plane later. The attached photo is of the Minnesota River looking southwest towards East Bloomington and Burnsville. The Minnesota River splits from the Mississippi River a few miles northeast of this photo. You can see highway 77 crossing the river, and the smokestack in the middle is an Xcel energy plant. Closer to the plane (near 6 o’clock in the photo) you can see a water treatment plant.
A less industrial view above Minnesota comes from Luke:
Luke Timmons
I took this photo coming into land in the Twin Cities last October. It was a weekend trip from Scotland to surprise the girl who is now my wife on her birthday. I’m glad I remembered I had a photo from this flight, since it was by far the most pleasant flight journey I’ve ever taken, right down to the joy brought about by the Delta crew.
The attendant informed me the jackrabbit on the wingtip is named Jake. I don’t know exactly why she felt that was important information for a 26 year old, traveling in business clothes and poring over meeting notes, but I’m glad she told me.
Bill says he captured the photo “somewhere over Nebraska,” so that makes 27 states covered in our America by Air series so far. Do you have an aerial photo from neighboring Kansas, or Kentucky, or Minnesota, or maybe Montana? Vermont—maybe from someone flying home from the Bernie campaign? West Virginia, with some country roads? From lil’ Rhode Island? Please send your photos our way and help us get to 50: hello@theatlantic.com. Submission guidelines here.
Update from a reader, Dan, who makes a reference to something I thought of while posting this photo of a rabbit on the wing: the episode of The Twilight Zone when an airline passenger played by William Shatner keeps seeing a human-like creature on the wing at 20,000 feet and starts to go insane when no one else sees it. A YouTube compilation is here. Here’s the entirety of Dan’s email:
The image comes from a reader in Friday Harbor, Washington: “It’s a late-afternoon rainbow amid a rain shower while flying in the Class C airspace of Whidbey Island NAS, on Whidbey Island, WA.”
Fun series! This is actually an old photo from March 2008 flying into Barrow, Alaska. I’m a contractor/scientist at NOAA and am super lucky that I get to travel to lots of cool (and often cold) places to do maintenance on atmospheric instruments—for example, at their baseline observatory just outside the town of Barrow.
Barrow is on the north coast of Alaska, and while there’s open water in the summer, when I took this picture it was all frozen. The sea ice is the bumpy-looking snow between the wing of the plane and the town, while the snow-covered tundra is smooth.
A previous view above the airport in Barrow is here, along with an explanation of why the area is under environmental threat. Less ominously, since May 10, Barrow has been covered in sunlight around the clock; the sun doesn’t set for three months during the summer:
An absolutely stunning shot from reader Kevin, who doesn’t have to worry about traffic jams:
I love your “America By Air” series. I am an aerial surveyor by trade and hobby … and have amassed tons of photos over my 15+ years in the business. My office is currently a Bell 206B JetRanger Helicopter. I’ve worked in many different aircraft over the years and absolutely love the vantage point that flying gives. Combine that with a child-like love of aviation and geography and that’s me in a nutshell.
It was just on your latest edition that I saw the link to submit photos and thought I’d send a few your way. If you’re interested in more, I have plenty and I’d love to share.
Yes please. And if you have your own photo to share, even if we’ve already posted one, drop us a line: hello@theatlantic.com. Submission guidelines are here, for increased chance of posting, along with some context on how this aerial series got started. Your photos just keep getting better.
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.