I think the first two (like many of my photos, I have to admit) suffer from a very common wide-angle composition failure, namely the "find something to stick in the foreground" syndrome.

With wide angle, you absolutely have to have something in the foreground, else everything looks so far away that it's not interesting.

But unless the choice of foreground contains interest in its own right, and also leads, somehow coherently, to the mid- and back- ground, I think the composition is ultimately unsatisfying, and that's what I think is wrong with 1 and 2. The rocks are too featureless, random, and unconnected with the rest of the frame to make the ploy successful. The backgrounds are nice, but not strong enough either, I think.

I like the third one. Even though it's next to impossible to really capture the height and depth with such scenes, it does convey the cold and general bleakness of such terrain in bad weather. The mountain, finally, although far away, is shown in its true dominance. And anyone that's spent any time at all on the fells will be able to relate to the photo immediately, so it does its job.

Well yes, there are lots of accounts of survival, following wing damage of all kinds, often severe.

I can't say it's an in-flight emergency that I'd like to have to deal with myself, but at cruise speed or above, the remnants of a wing will be generating lift, and it's not surprising that there are occasional documented instances where it's enough. The majority where it wasn't enough and they crashed, of course, are less noteworthy, and not so documented.

The F15 in the vid I posted earlier still had a bit of wing left, and landed at twice the normal speed, with a tailhook to help it stop.

The RC aircraft in the second one landed on its side and skidded to a stop in a few feet. Try that in an real plane weighing nearly a ton at 50mph or more, and the result will be very different.

But I am happy to downgrade my earlier "completely impossible" to "exceedingly unlikely".

I still maintain that to imagine a catastrophic failure, with loss of the wing at the root, during aerobatic manoeuvres, with recovery to knife-edge flight and a safe landing, is simply fantasy.

Fun, but fantasy nevertheless.

Well I fly recreationally, have done for many years, and I've always been interested in most aspects of aviation.

But as I say, I may have to eat some of my words, such as "completely impossible".

If you compare the original video with the RC plane, it's clear that (with it's enormous power to weight ratio compared with 'real' aeroplanes) it enters knife-edge flight almost immediately with enough speed for the trailing remaining wing to give it directional stability.

Whereas in the original one, the spin it entered before they cut to the knife-edge would be normal for an aircraft with both wings, under control, but I still don't believe for a moment that it would look like that with only one wing - the spin would be much faster and be unrecoverable (plenty of aircraft can't be recovered from spins even with both wings!).

Note also the difference between the RC model's landing, and the one in the original vid. I think they just edited out the other wing - the flight looks perfectly normal until just before the landing if you mentally paint that wing back in.

Addendum:

Although, to my amazement, it is possible to fly in something very fast with most of one wing gone.

This Youtube video is fairly extraordinary.

Edit...

Hmm. Maybe I should eat some of my words.

This RC vid is genuine, I think.

You're right that so-called knife-edge flight is possible with modern aerobatic aircraft, where the weight is balanced by lift generated from the angle of attack made by the inclined fuselage, and the inclined thrust of the propeller.

But it is inconceivable that from the point the wing broke off, the aircraft would have been controllable.

Aircraft with only one wing enter a violent, uncontrollable spin and crash. Much like the way sycamore seeds spin as they fall.


If you look carefully, the wing appears to break off in the flick roll at the top of the vertical. It is completely inconceivable that that would be recoverable.

He recovers from the flick roll at low speed, and then enters a perfectly normal spin, from which they cut to a bit of knife edge flight.

I agree it's well done, and very funny with the lower wing edited out. But completely impossible.

It is undoubtedly a fake. Hilarious, but impossible.


What was absolutely not a fake, however, was when Neil Williams, one-time British National Aerobatic champion, back in the 70s, had been practising in his Zlin.

His wing broke, and the wing started to fold upwards.

With extraordinary presence of mind, he rolled the aircraft away from the wing, to the inverted, at which point it snapped back into place.

He then flew inverted all the way back to the airfield, down final approach, and then rolled it erect again a few tens of feet off the ground. Although the wing started to fold again, it lasted long enough for him to bang it into the ground and walk away.

He's a real legend in aviation circles. His accident report is here.

I can soon fix that by posting a picture of him - don't believe him when he says it's his ugly elder brother.

Edit... found it:
[IMG]http://i162.photobucket.com/albums/t244/chris5gd/Competition%20photos/IMGP8576.jpg[/IMG]

The stop-down-metering issue is with the K10D as you say. However, it's only when it is stopped down in Manual mode using the green button or the DOF preview lever. There is no issue with wide-open metering, manual or otherwise, with the K10D.

Some are of the opinion that the K10D underexposes generally by a little more than half a stop. But that has nothing to do with the stop-down metering issue, which manifests itself as a progressively increasing over-exposure with increasing F-number.

Mirror lenses are usually fixed aperture, always effectively wide open, and so I would not expect this particular issue to be relevant.

From what I've read, but cannot verify, this was not, apparently, a problem with the K100D. I haven't read any comments about the K200D in this context.

Completely agree with John, here.

There certainly isn't.

Not only that, but it is undeniably the case, as you say, that:
When you release the shutter with your finger, even carefully, there is a level of shake in the final picture which is small but clear - which SR, in my studies, made no difference to (ie, it made it neither worse nor better).

It's only when you use a remote or delayed mode that complete elimination of shake is possible.

And then, assuming the manual is telling the truth, SR is automatically switched off.

So if you want ultimate sharpness, you need the delay or the remote, and SR will be off whether you want it or not.

Completely accept this.

Completely accept this, too.


What I do not accept is the way speculation, assumption and hearsay have completely replaced any semblance of sense when it comes to the reason for the warnings in the manuals, which Pentax do not specify.

I've scoured this and the US pentax forum quite carefully on this subject, and there is lots in the way of unsupported claims, anecdote, speculation, and pseudo-logic, but not even one single instance of actual evidence for the common assertion that SR causes shake when the camera is still.

I'm always open to new information, including someone's careful, repeatable experiment that proves me completely wrong - that's the nature of the scientific method.

I have no axe to grind other than my personal preference for facts and evidence, rather than unsupported hearsay.