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.)
Here are a few pics from our recent trip to Colorado in the little airplane I built in my garage 10 years ago! We flew over Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve and visited on the ground a few hours later. My wife and I were on vacation from St Paul. Story here.
Mosca Pass was named for Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, whose scouting parties may have reached this area about 1542. He was a Spanish explorer and conquistador credited as the first European to reach Texas.
I asked Pete if he could share a good photo of his plane—“a Van’s RV-9A”—and he definitely delivered:
A helpful reader, Daniel, gets us one step closer to 50 states: “I saw in the Notes section that you don’t have a photo from Delaware, so I’m happy to lend a hand with a photo from the first state.” That bit of trivia I didn’t know. Here’s more about Daniel and his photo:
I’m a Brit, my wife is a Delawarean. We live abroad but travel back to the States for friends and family about once a year. My wife’s family is in Sussex county, DE, and when I first visited, I was struck by the sheer number of place names stolen from my native land: Sussex, Lewes, Seaford, Dover, Kent, Camden—all places I’ve lived in or near. It’s like a little home from home.
Two winters ago, right before one of the major snow storms, we were on our way to see friends and had a connecting flight in Philly. The easiest way for us to get there from Sussex was on a tiny propeller plane from Salisbury, MD. The plane was small enough for either me or my wife to be guaranteed a window seat. She is a better person than me, and so I spent the flight gawking out the window, happily snapping away on my iPhone.
This photo is taken from right above Lewes, DE, where we have family (and of the Cape May ferry fame). The sandy part jutting out, and the adjacent woodland, is Cape Henlopen State Park, a piece of land set aside for public use in the 1680s—which has to make it one of the first. I hadn’t visited it at the time I took the photo, but I’ve been belatedly learning to drive there since, so I’ve also taken in the trails and ocean front. It has to rank as one of the most idyllic places I’ve ever seen: beach and forest, sand and soil, shell and pine cone, with a thick salt marsh right in the middle. It’s become an almost-sacred place, and so this photo serves as a reminder while we’re away from homes, old and new.
A long-time reader, Paul, checks another state off our list of 50:
I mostly grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, so I am very used to the view of mist rising from the water in the early morning. But in all my years of flying, I guess I’d never headed out until later in the day. When my wife, Katy, recently peeled off to Montreal with our daughter really really early in the morning, and she showed me the photos she’d taken after takeoff, I was really amazed to see what my riverine memories looked like from the air.
Her iPhone geo-located the photo at Nicholasville—a bit south of Lexington. The source of the mist is the Kentucky River, deep in its gorge at this point, and the shape of the river is recognizable from the map. The river is about 500 feet below the bluegrass plateau and the gorge is a quarter-mile wide or so. That is a lot of water vapor!
If you have a great aerial photo of your own to share, especially from one of the states we haven’t covered yet—CT, DE, GA, ID, IN, IA, ME, MS, MT, NV, NM, ND, RI, TN, VT, WV—please send our way, ideally with a part of the plane showing: hello@theatlantic.com.
This shot was taken on a flight from Sky Harbor in Phoenix to San Diego. I especially love the juxtaposition of the rectangular solar array and the circular center pivot irrigators.
Located in Yuma County, Arizona, near Dateland, the Agua Caliente station can generate 290 MW of electricity, enough to power 100,000 “average” homes. The array consists of 5.2 million cadmium/telluride thin film modules on fixed tilt mounts no more than six feet above the ground “to reduce the visual impact.” That’s a bit ironic considering 5,200,000 of anything is going to have a hell of a visual impact, even from 32,000 feet in the air.
The power station, which is bigger than 1800 football fields and is one the largest in the world, is owned in part by MidAmerican Renewables, a Berkshire Hathaway company and a nice visual representation of the enormity of Warren Buffet’s wealth. In a slight coincidence, MidAmerican is my hometown utility and I emailed the photo from my office in the MidAmerican Building.
Next up: A hydroelectric dam? A coal-power plant? If you have either, please drop us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.
This photo was taken on the approach to DTW [Detroit Metropolitan Airport]. I had made this same flight from RDU [Raleigh–Durham International Airport] to DTW earlier in the week and noted that when I took off I had a clear view of Sharon-Harris nuclear power plant in NC on takeoff and Fermi II nuclear plant in MI on approach for landing. When I made the flight again, at dusk this time, I noticed the stack plumes from Fermi II almost glowing on the ground.
These photos were taken on the last leg of a long trip back from visiting family in Seattle to my “opposite Washington.” The location is somewhere between Dallas/Fort Worth airport and Washington, DC. I love the contrast of the green landscape barely visible beneath the cotton ball clouds.
What a fun series!
Four states within our reader’s potential flight path—Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia—are still missing from our America by Air series, in our quest to get all 50 states. If you happen to have a good aerial photo above one of those four, please send it out way: hello@theatlantic.com.
I flew out to Los Angeles late last year. I’m a good plane sleeper and was snoozing, but luckily I awoke just as we were flying over the Grand Canyon. Buildings, mountains and monuments tend to look tiny when viewed from the air, but nothing can diminish the awesome size of one of America’s greatest national landmarks.
If you happen to have any great aerial views above a national park, please let us know. When I asked Daniel if he was on an American Airlines flight, he replied:
Haha, yeah I thought that might be an appropriate touch given the name of the series. Good guess but it’s Virgin America. I guess as we’re seeing from the Budweiser “America” rebrand, no one does campy faux patriotism like the Europeans.
For Independence Day, a collage of photos from three readers on the flight path leaving Reagan National:
Bill Ruch sent the lower-right photo, adding: “There’s a reason why I go out of my way to book a seat on the right side of the plane when flying out of DC.” Jim Ciszewski sent the sunny one. Jada Chin sent the upper-right one:
Weary from waking up for my early flight to Boston, I peaked outside my window view to see the sun rising as the plane took off from DC. The city from above looked so small, and I could see the array of lights from each building shine next to the Washington Monument. This was no ordinary sunrise. It was a perfect view of the city that I call home.
I’m landing from the south at Midway (MDW) with downtown Chicago in the background. As any passenger who has landed here can attest, Midway has a nerve-wracking approach over dense urban geography.
There is none of the bucolic open space of a traditional airport approach zone, transitioning slowly from developed landscape, to highway, and finally open fields surrounding the airport. At Midway, it’s railroad yards, industrial sprawl, and—most incongruous of all—suburban houses directly across the street from the airport fence. You get the very urgent sense that the pilot needs to set the plane down “on the numbers” or else bad things will happen just 6000 feet down at the other end of the runway.
Midway is a tiny airport considering the volume of traffic it handles. It occupies a “section” of land. A section is 640 acres, and this land unit traces its origin to the Northwest Ordinance. You can clearly see the old section lines in the street-scape of Chicago with major arteries standing out in bold relief running along the traditional homestead boundaries. In contrast, O’Hare International (ORD) covers over 7000 acres. O’Hare is so vast that it’s literally bucolic, with exotic animals grazing on its grassy expanse.
I had always assumed that the airport took its name from a geographic reference regarding its physical relationship to downtown Chicago. But this only demonstrates my historical ignorance, since the field in fact was named in honor of the WWII Battle of Midway—the historic turning point in the Pacific campaign. Chicago’s other airport, O’Hare, owes its name to a local WWII hero Butch O’Hare who received the Medal of Honor for his service in the Pacific theater.
Chicago used to have a third airport, Meigs Field, which occupied a prime location on the lakefront. The story of its closing, including concerns over terrorism, elite privilege, and hard-ball Illinois politics, was a sad blow to general aviation.
Kevin Grambley, who previously submitted the heli-view over Houston, also captured a crisp scene over O’Hare International Airport in Chicago:
Kevin Grambley
If you have a favorite airport shot—or maybe a horror story traveling through O’Hare? (my last connection there was hellish)—please shoot it our way: hello@theatlantic.com.
This gorgeous series of shots from reader Bill Barse makes for one of the best—and certainly the most comprehensive—entries in our ongoing tour of the 50 states:
Hello Chris, I hope this note finds you well. For your America by Air series I want to share some pictures of a flight I took in 2009 from central Arkansas to Front Royal, Virginia, in a rather weather-beaten Grumman Ag Cat—a plane I bought for the heck of it:
I spent about three years working on it and learning to fly the little plane before taking it on a 1000-mile cross-country flight. It’s a 1963 “lite frame,” as the dusters call it. I first saw one of them in a duster’s field in Delaware some 40 years ago on the way to the beach. I passed that same plane several years off and on while taking the same route, and I told myself I’d love to have one. Now I have two.
They are really great planes to fly—quite simple, very agile in the air, and able to handle quite a bit of weight when used for what it was originally designed: ag work!
The first several pictures I took on my trip are those of the Arkansas River and Mississippi River. I flew out of Woodson Arkansas eastward. Here’s a picture flying rather low (as in 800 feet or so) over the Arkansas River:
This picture, using a disposable color-print camera, is about 40 miles south of Little Rock and reflects a rather undeveloped view of this portion of the state—very little in the way of dense populated regions. Also, it’s close to a town called Slovak, a center of immigration in the late 19th Century and a community that still exists with one church and several houses just north of Stuttgart, Arkansas.
Here’s a picture I took with a digital camera when crossing the Mississippi River:
I had just departed West Helena, Arkansas (where I re-fueled), a town about 40 plus miles south of Memphis. The airport there was a duster field. There was a series of barges plying the river upstream with goods on the way to Memphis or beyond. The [above] photo, looking upriver towards Memphis, shows one barge moving south. Although not seen too well, there was an incredible line of barges (pushed by tugs) going south towards New Orleans—something I had seen in a previous flight (with no pictures!) in 2008 when I flew into Arkansas from Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Here are a few more pictures continuing my journey from a grass strip in Arkansas, across Tennessee, and up Virginia to the Front Royal airport near the entrance of Skyline Drive.
The first picture shows central Tennessee, near Shelbyville, with the trees showing fall foliage:
I was flying about 2000 feet above ground level. I made a left turn before the Smoky Mountains and flew up two ridges west of Roanoke.
Clinch Mountain, in this next shot, was impressive, and the view is looking west close to passing the Tennessee-Virginia border:
Since the valley floor was rising in elevation (ca. 2000 feet above sea level), I had to climb higher … eventually getting to 5000 feet and slightly above ridge level! Since this plane had no transponder, I had to fly around Roanoke’s airport.
In this next picture you can see the deeply weathered ridges of the Ridge and Valley physiographic province (Roanoke is at the inner edge of the Piedmont province):
One thing that stood out on this and other flights: Once away from the cities, large portions of area east of the Mississippi were remarkable for the open expanse of country, particularly once I began to traverse the mountains!
Here is the last picture documenting my trip from the rice fields of Arkansas to the Blue Ridge of Virginia:
This image was taken just south of Staunton, Virginia, where I finally got out of the narrow valleys that paralleled the Allegheny Front and crossed over into the Great Valley that extends along the Ridge and Valley Province. Staunton, Harrisonburg, Front Royal, and Winchester, Virginia are all in the Great Valley, as is Hagerstown, Maryland. I was really impressed by the vast expanse of undeveloped—now, that is—mountain terrain, though I know at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries this area was heavily logged, leaving many areas essentially deforested.
I did not use any advanced navigation for the flight—simply a set of sectionals. Here’s a scan of the World Aeronautical Charts, from CG-20:
I do hope you find my photos of interest. I have followed Mr. Fallows trips with fascination and find those areas of the U.S. off the beaten track far more culturally and historically complex than most people realize … at least until they visit and talk with those who have lived there for several generations. All are immigrants of a sort from one or more generations ago, reflecting broad patterns of settlement that have led to a very diverse nation, to say the least! As an anthropologist (and archeologist), I have found such travels mini-ethnographic studies.