It has been an unbelievably tragic week at the Reno Air Races. On Tuesday, Steve Dari died when the Rose Peregrine RP-5 biplane he was piloting crashed after developing engine trouble shortly after takeoff. Yesterday, Brad Morehouse perished when his L-39C crashed after apparently getting caught in the wake of another jet. Then this morning, Gary Hubler died when the Cassutt racer he was piloting crashed after a collision involving two other aircraft, one of which was an Owl OR71 piloted by Jason Somes. Prior to this year the last fatal crash at Reno was in 2002.

After shooting solely with a Canon 20D for the last 3 years, I have added a second camera body to my gear - the Canon 40D. I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs at the North Georgia Air & Car Show next weekend. In the mean time, here are a couple of initial shots taken from my backyard.

Jan Wildbergh was killed yesterday in the crash of a GEICO Skytyper SNJ-2 at Naval Air Station Oceana. Jan was a veteran of the Dutch Air Force, where he flew the F-84 Thunderjet. He immigrated to the United States in 1959 where he worked as a flight instructor, chief pilot and FAA pilot examiner. Jan had been a pilot with the Skytypers since 1986.

One of the GEICO Skytypers has crashed while practicing for the Naval Air Station Oceana air show. Ralph Roberts with the GEICO Skytyper team has reported during an interview on WAVY news that the #6 aircraft has gone down. There is no information on the fate of the pilot. For additional information please see the AirShowBuzz forums.

David Burdine was killed on Monday when the YAK-52 he was in crashed shortly after takeoff. Also killed in the crash was the pilot, Steven Hildebrand. David was a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot. He was well known on the air show circuit as the owner and pilot of the blue and red MiG-17. Additional info can be found at the AirShowBuzz forums.

I decided to create this blog to present some of my other aviation photography that doesn’t fit the air show theme of my ShowLinePhoto site. You can expect to see things like military and civilian airport spotting photos, aviation museum tour photos, and even photos from my own backyard (yes, I am one of those people who run outside to see what is flying over). In addition, I will be posting comments about the air shows I attend and posting newsworthy events about the air show and aviation trades.

Speaking of newsworthy events, I have been hard at work this summer with a redesign of the ShowLinePhoto site. The overall theme will closely mirror this blog site. Gone will be the javascript menubar and in its place a simpler text based menubar. A new section will be added - videos! And finally, after many requests, I will have prints for sale. I still have several things to accomplish, including attending five air shows in the next nine weeks, so please excuse my tardiness if I don’t get the fall air show photos posted in a timely manner.

That’s all for now, thanks for stopping by and feel free to comment about anything you see here.