Nice lighting there, Jim. Been seeing a lot of posts in social media about the Airbus A340-600 being retired by Lufthansa and that only 6 are still actively flying for other services.. Something about a 4 engine plane that takes me back to the first trip I can remember in a Boing 707. The economics of flying these jets is quite interesting...
Two observations from the pre-9/11 era when you could still visit the cockpit of an aircraft mid-flight. I had an opportunity to fly the Concorde to London and went to visit the cockpit, and the amount of dials the flight engineer was keeping track of was dizzying - probably more than a hundred. On one of my flights back from Frankfurt to IAD in an A340, I went into the cockpit somewhere over Nova Scotia to talk to the crew, and before I knew it, they asked me if I wanted to buckle into the spare seat and enjoy the landing from the cockpit. Such a different perspective when you're looking forward at the runway as opposed to the landscape out the side. It's a real shame that those days are long gone.
I walked into the 777 cockpit to shoot the pilots going through their shakedown flight checks. I greeted both pilots and told them just to continue doing "pilot things". They laughed and one of them looked my way, stopped in his tracks and said, "is that a Hasselblad......are you shooting a Hasselblad?!" I said yes and reached out to hand it to him. Checklisting ceased and a long discussion about the camera ensued. Both pilots were great guys from the UK, DHL crew, the reverence they showed the Hasselblad as they cradled it in their hands was fun to watch.
