pilot

A remarkable first-person video of a Russian fighter pilot ejecting from his aircraft which then crashes into a field has emerged from the war in Ukraine.

Flying a drone into a waterfall would be a disaster for most pilots. Yet, for a professional drone pilot and YouTuber Instagrammer who goes by the handle Blastr, it’s a common occurrence and one that yields fantastic results.

I hold a private pilot certificate, as well as a remote pilot certificate; I am also a photographer. I just wanted to share with you some advice from a budding pilot who comes from the much larger world of flying that is general aviation.

We’ve written a number of times recently about how flying your camera drone near wildfires is both dangerous and illegal, but this week two men also discovered that getting too close to killer whales can also get you in trouble with the law. Two drone pilots recently did just that in Washington, and they received hefty fines.

When photographing Czech aerobatics and fighter pilot Martin Šonka recently, photographer Dan Vojtěch wanted to capture the plane in a different light than other photographers have done in the past. He then decided that he would shoot the plane in motion, but light it like he would a studio photo using flashes firing around it.

On May 31st, 2014, a small Cessna plane crashed in a field a few miles away from Denver, killing its pilot and passenger. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) just published a report with findings from its investigation, concluding that the crash was most likely caused by the pilot becoming disoriented while taking selfies of himself.

The FAA has been working on a set of regulations for commercial drone use for months now, and according to the most recent reports, the results of all that work are some extremely strict rules that include requiring a full-blown pilot's license if you intend to sell what you're capturing.

Yesterday, the story of two DJI Phantom quadcopters endangering an NYPD helicopter made the rounds online. Initial reports claimed that the two 'drones' were flying right at the helicopter forcing the NYPD pilot to take evasive action before following the Phantoms back to their source and taking the RC pilots into custody.

The air traffic control recording and several statements from the pilots themselves, however, seem to run contrary to what the NYPD is claiming, making it look like the helicopter was never in danger and, in fact, chased down the pilots with no idea what to even charge them with.

In honor of Memorial Day, a couple of months ago, the folks behind the Sundance Film Festival decided to dig up a short honorable mention winner from 2007 and put it up on YouTube. Called Spitfire 944, the film show WWII Photo Reconnaissance pilot Lt Col. John S. Blyth telling his story and reacting to footage of a crash landing he made all the way back in 1944 that he had never seen before.

Colonel George Everette "Bud" Day is a retired U.S. Air Force Command Pilot who served his country during the Vietnam war, enduring a stint as a POW and earning the Medal of Honor and the Air Force Cross.

When he was asked to be on the cover of Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine, it was portrait photographer Robert Seale who got the honor of photographing him, and for our sakes, he put together a behind-the-scenes video while he was at it.

Karim Nafatni has a view of the world that most other photography enthusiasts don't have. When he's not scouring the Dubai landscape for sweeping architectural photographs, Nafatni is often tens of thousands of feet in the air, working in the cockpit of large jetliners as a pilot for a major airline.

You've probably seen time-lapse videos shot looking out the side of an airplane through a passenger window, but have you ever seen one from the pilot's point of view? If not, check out the beautiful video above. It was created by pilot Jakub Vlk, who brought his Canon 600D to work and captured photographs across seven days. The video shows Vlk taxiing to the runway, taking off, floating up into the clouds, flying around, and landing.

Alex MacLean is a Massachusetts-based photographer and pilot who uses his dual interests to create epic aerial photographs.

Alex MacLean has flown his plane over much of the United States documenting the landscape. Trained as an architect, he has portrayed the history and evolution of the land from vast agricultural patterns to city grids, recording changes brought about by human intervention and natural processes. His powerful and descriptive images provide clues to understanding the relationship between the natural and constructed environments.