Breitling Wingwalkers
Now this is impressive. Most of the other pilots haven’t even been flying with open cockpits.
Now these guys (and gals) I loved to photograph. They left massive plumes of white smoke, and their bright orange fuselage looked incredible against the blue of the sea and sky. Plus, the biplanes look pretty damned impressive.
Looking impressive is one thing. But these things sounded amazing, and they executed moves as if there wasn’t a girl strapped to each of their wings.
Looking back into the history of this team, we’re quite lucky to see them in this brilliant orange – their old sponsors have included Utterly Butterly, and the planes didn’t look quite as startling in that livery.
To give an idea of the sheer speed of the propellers (and, by extension, the noise they were making), I was able to shoot in aperture priority mode and still get motion of the props, even at shutter speeds of 1/1250 of a second.
From our vantage point on the East Cliff, as I have previously stated (although I will forgive you if you’ve skipped over a bit), we were near enough level with the planes when they did their low passes, allowing me to grab snaps like this next one.
Although admittedly shot with a 300mm lens on a non-full frame camera, there is nevertheless no cropping on that last image – I was able to get shots that close without and post-processing. This is just the sort of shot I dreamed of getting way back when I was shooting the Red Arrows with a point-and-shoot.
The 300mm focal length also allowed me to get pretty close with the planes even as they were at the peak of their looping manoeuvres.
Towards the end of the display, the girls actually get out of their harnesses. This is the equivalent of boys riding their bikes with no hands, which as I recall usually ends in tears.
In this next one, the biplanes loop back into their own smoke trail, casting some cool shadows in the bright sunlight.
I love the sea in that last image – it is so crisp, and reflects the smoke trails beautifully.
Now, at this point you’re probably thinking I’ve been a little bit obsessive with my photo taking, and that I should’ve just enjoyed the planes rather than spending so much time pointing a camera at them. Well, if you’ve made it this far you probably don’t think that, but still. The point is I wasn’t the only one going crazy with a camera.
I like the fact you can see not just the smoke trails reflected in the water in the latter image, but also the shadows of the plane.
And with that, the biplanes flew off into the sun. Actually that isn’t true, they flew away from the sun. But they flew low.
That was an impressive display – and these images simply don’t convey the noise these things made. I think I’ve mentioned this before. But anyway, there’s a video.
Well done for making it this far. If it’s taken you this long to read it, pause for a moment to consider how long it took me to write it. Thanks for sticking with me and humouring my desire to show you some silly pictures I took. But we are nearly at the end; there is only one more display to show you. And this one contains some of my best images.
Creative Splurges 
The Breitling Wingwalkers flew over Knaphill today (29th August) around 3.15, probably on the way from Dunsfold to Cardiff, but I didn’t have my camera at the ready 😦
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I now have this image of the planes flying over with the girls still on top, reading newspapers…
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Nice photos, thanks for sharing!
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