I absolutely love taking pictures from helicopters. It makes it even better when I can take pictures of other things that fly through the air that I love from helicopters! Recently, in the run-up to all the MD-80 retirement festivities, I randomly found a guy who had really good access to the airspace at DFW Airport. When I say randomly, I mean I saw his helicopter flying over DFW Airport and knew the airspace well enough to know he had some special access, so I took a picture of the heli’s tail number, looked it up in federal registries, called the number I found, and asked him when I could go up!
He was a wonderful lad from the UK and I spent all the disposable income I had for the next quarter century we went up a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to share some of my favorites from the flight for this week’s Picture(s) of the week!
The first picture is from one of my favorite places: Founder’s Plaza at DFW Airport. I’ve spent countless hours there planespotting and meeting all sorts of aviation enthusiasts, I loved being able to take a picture of it from the air in beautiful morning light!
The next picture is of the morning Asia arrivals at DFW, JAL from Tokyo, American from…Tokyo, and Korean from Seoul. I love the compression that shooting this pic from the air provided.
The really cool part of being in a heli though are the cool perspectives you can get of planes on the ground, like this American 737.
As we flew around waiting for an MD-80 to take off, we saw some other MD-80s sitting at a pad, waiting for their retirement.
And other American jets sitting at the gate.
As we hovered over the “spine” road that runs through the middle of DFW (and also the spine transition airspace through the middle of DFW’s airspace), I was able to get a cool sweeping view of American jets at DFW terminals A and C (count how many MD-80s you see in the picture and tell me in the comments below!)
But the really cool part about being in a helicopter so close to the airfield is capturing planes as they take off…
…and land!
Hope you enjoyed these awesome aerial planespotting pics for the picture of the week feature! Tell me which was your favorite in the comments below!
Andy – is there a particular time on the weekend when you can see some of the big planes land/take-off at Founders Plaza? Like the A-380 and 747s? I’d like to take the kids and make it a fun hour (or 2) there some weekend. Thanks for the wonderful work!
Thank you for reading! The Qantas A380 lands around 1pm most days, the 747s are a bit more unreliable since they’re almost all cargo aircraft. Founders is closed until October for renovations, just as a note.