I haven't visited FRA for several weekends, which felt like an eternity. And even though the weather forecast promised rain and a dip in temperatures along with changing wind directions, the pull of FRA was impossible to resist.

Last Monday, I went on a day trip to MUC. Because it was scorching hot, I decided not to be a hero and opted for the observation deck in Terminal 2 instead of Besucherhügel. Not that it made a huge difference. Although there are a few shadowy pocket on the deck, you still bound to roast slowly under the relentless...

Advanced age demands advanced solutions. My knees are killing me: walking is fine, but standing still is not. So after doing some research (that is, browsing Amazon), I've splurged on a collapsible stool.

We went on a 9-day trip to Istanbul, and it was great. The only fly in the ointment was the shiny new Istanbul International Airport (IST). That is the most aircraft photography unfriendly airport I've been to. Admittedly, I haven't been to all that many airports, but still.

My Saturday's visit to NUE was what I call a fishing expedition: there were no interesting airplanes in the schedule, but I hoped that something interesting will show up anyway. I didn't have time to make my own lunch pack, so I dropped by Der Beck and bought a jalapeno bagel.

Yesterday at 14:08:35 local time, my ADS-B station tracked 62 aircraft. It is by far the highest number of airplanes my station tracked at any given moment. Normally during the rush hour in the skies, the average number of machines in range of my ADS-B station is somewhere between 40 and 50.

I always wondered why some of Lufthansa airplanes have small yellow rectangles along the right edge of the main boarding doors. This Ask The Pilot article explains it all. It's a board for crewmembers to scribble greetings to the passengers. A nice little touch.

What a day! It had been drizzling on and off all morning, I forgot my rain jacket, and my feet got soaking wet. Visibility was poor, with very low cloud cover. So it was pretty much impossible to get decent photos of precious few departing airplanes.

When I travel light, this is what I use as my preferred backup setup: an iPad mini 4, an Anker USB-C 2-in-1 card reader, and a Lexar 128GB microSD card as backup storage. An iPhone with a USB-C port would make it an even lighter and smaller backup appliance, but I'm not buying an iPhone just for that.

I've implemented a simple but convenient feature that automatically picks up files with names containing the current date from the articles/drafts directory and publishes them (that is, moves all matching files from articles/drafts to articles/).

Boeing 737-783 registration LN-RPJ is not a regular airliner. It's a medevac airplane that transports wounded Ukrainian soldiers from the Polish border town of Rzeszów (RZE) to destinations around Western Europe. Here are articles that offer more context:

Camera? Check. Lunch? Check. Coffee? Check. The weather was wonderful, so off I went to capture airplanes in NUE. Out of habit, I went to the rooftop of the car parking building. But there I ran into a chatty teenager, who kept talking incessantly, absolutely wanting me to see all his airplane photos. Not...