AERIAL PHOTO:
THE ATTACHED PICTURE IS REALLY
ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING THAT YOU'VE EVER SEEN. READ THE EXPLANATION BEFORE LOOKING AT THE PICTURE. FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO LIKE AIRCRAFT, THIS IS SOMETHING.
Through the viewfinder of his
camera, Ensign John Gay could see the
fighter plane drop from the sky heading toward the port side of the
aircraft carrier Constellation. At
1,000 feet, the pilot drops the F/A_18C Hornet to increase his speed to 750
mph, vapor flickering off the curved
surfaces of the plane. In the precise moment a cloud in the shape
of a farm_fresh egg forms around the
Hornet 200 yards from the carrier, its engines rippling the Pacific Ocean just
75 feet below, Gay hears an explosion and snaps his camera shutter once.
"I clicked the same time I heard the boom, and I knew I had it," Gay
said. What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of the sound barrier
being broken July 7, 1999, somewhere on the Pacific between Hawaii and Japan.
Sports Illustrated, Brills Content and Life ran the photo. The
photo recently took first prize in the
science and technology division in the
World Press Photo 2000 contest, which drew more than 42,000 entries
worldwide.
"All of a sudden, in the last few days, I've been getting calls
from everywhere about it again. It's kind of neat," he said, in a
telephone interview from his station in
Virginia Beach, Va. A naval veteran of
12 years, Gay, 38, manages a crew of eight assigned to take intelligence
photographs from the high_tech belly of an F_14 Tomcat, the fastest fighter in the U.S. Navy. In July, Gay had been part of a Joint
Task Force Exercise as the Constellation made its way to Japan.
Gay selected his Nikon 90 S,
one of the five 35 mm cameras he owns.
He set his 80_300 mm zoom lens
on 300 mm, set his shutter speed at 1/1000 of a second with an aperture setting
f F5.6. "I put it on full manual,
focus and exposure," Gay
said. "I tell young photographers
who are into automatic everything, you aren't going to get that shot on auto.
The plane is too fast. The camera can't
keep up."
At sea level a plane must exceed 741
mph to break the sound barrier, or the speed at which sound
travels. The change in pressure as the plane outruns all of the
pressure and sound waves in front of it
is heard on the ground as an explosion or sonic boom. The pressure change
condenses the water in the air as the jet passes these waves. Altitude, wind speed, humidity, the shape
and trajectory of the plane _ all of
these affect the breaking of this barrier. The slightest drag or atmospheric
pull on the plane shatters the vapor oval like fireworks as the plane passes through, he said everything on
July 7 was perfect, he said.
"You see this vapor flicker around the plane that gets bigger and bigger. You get this loud boom, and it's instantaneous. The vapor cloud is there, and then it's not there. It's the coolest thing you have ever seen."