It's been a while since I posted, but I guess life just gets in the way sometimes. Training, paperwork, ground school, simulators, family time, and some deliberate, healthy distance from quagmire of social media.

Life goes on, and I was reminded of a shot I took almost ten years ago, somewhere over the remote regions of central Russia, when this airspace was still open to European airlines. One of the technically most difficult shots I ever took, straight into the rising sun.

We took off from Luxembourg in our 747-8 for a 13-hour flight to Japan, flying a bit further south than our normal routing due to the prevailing winds of the day.
And just as the blinding copper disk of the sun was starting to rise due east, I heard another Boeing 747 over the radio, sending a standard position report along the same airway, coming in from the opposite direction.

They had taken off from Novosibirsk barely an hour earlier and had just settled at their cruising level when I heard a distinct Dutch voice over the radio making their initial report for this sector, mentioning our company callsign.
A voice I would recognize out of a million: the most distinct Hague accent, yet in perfectly clear English, one I knew from years ago. I immediately knew it was one of my best buddies from flight school. Unaware of each other’s schedules or flights, we managed to cross paths again (quite literally) somewhere over Russia, both flying our Boeing 747s far from home.

I readied my camera, but it refused to find proper exposure or focus, prompting me to go full manual.
Underexposing and manually focusing to compensate for the layered cockpit windows did the trick, resulting in this shot of my best friend flying his 747 across golden skies.

The result was better than I could have ever hoped for.
Happy days.