This was my first trip to Norway. Jan Arie told me that Bodo was a nice town and he was right on. The weather was perfect, still snow on the mountains, it was beautiful. We had planned to bring a second G650ER with Chandler on board to get air to air shots of us along the way, but the other Gulfstream was need somewhere else so we scrubbed that (Chandler was bummed, as was I).
The crew flew me to Dulles on Wednesday and no one else was aboard so I had a couple of hours to roam the fuselage and get prepared for documenting this trip. While not equivalent to the air to air images that we had hoped for, I discovered that the vertical stabilizer "Airshow" camera provided a pretty cool perspective. The quality is 720p so it's not anywhere near the quality of the rest of my captures, but "any port in a storm" as they say. The images are usable with some tweaking in Photoshop and a few other tricks.
My use of the tail camera peaked my client's interest and now we are talking with Gulfstream about engineering a 4K camera in the two G800's that are coming down the line for delivery in 2028. We will be taking those to Antarctica in November of 2028 to replicate Admiral Byrd's first expedition to that spot in 1928. The plan is to land on the ice runway on that trip. We will stage out of New Zealand. I had given up ever seeing the South Pole because there is no way I'd sail Drake's Passage, three days belted into my bunk............nothing is worth that.
This is a pretty cool shot of us rolling on to final for Perot Field Saturday morning. We left Bodo at 7 something that morning and touched down in Fort Worth at a little after 10 the same morning................tough to wrap my head around that. One of the coolest parts of the trip was the fact that we were directly over 90 Degrees North at 9:02 am, the same time Admiral Byrd recorded his crossing a century before.
Jul 18, 2026 at 05:12 PM
Previous versions of JWilsonphoto's message #17074283 « Mustang Air to Air: The Sequel »
