CARGOPILOT
- Aviation Photography By Christiaan Van Heijst
“ In heaven Seeing the entire world in my job,
I feel privileged to be in a position to capture many different parts of the planet through my camera and immortalize the beauty of the places I visit.”
Northern lights, thunderstorms or the Himalayas; the views from the cockpit of an airliner are never the same. Flying as a pilot on the Boeing 747-400 and 747-8 Freighters, I consider myself privileged to fly all over the world and combine that with my second passion, photography.
Endless and ever-changing landscapes of mountains, deserts, oceans or cloudscapes are passing by my windows and just ask to be captured before they are gone for good. Armed with a professional camera kit in my flight-bag, I find great joy in capturing my views and sharing them with the world— amazing views that are unique and never to be seen again. I just feel I have to preserve them.
With my first job as a pilot on a small turboprop, I found myself flying in Africa and Afghanistan for various local operators and airlines. Immediately I realized a need to document those adventures because they were simply so unique.
Now, 15 years later on the Boeing 747, my photography has grown parallel with my flying career. In the beginning I used to be happy shooting general cockpit photos, but I started to see a challenge in capturing the delicate atmospheres of night flights— the hardest to capture from a small flight deck with its thick windows.
Dancing northern lights, the Milky Way, violent thunderstorms, reflections from the moon in little lakes and rivers on the ground … it’ s nearly impossible to tell other people who don’ t have access to the cockpit of an airliner, how incredibly beautiful the world is when seen from high above. But with my camera and years of experience in aerial photography, I have now reached a point where I can immortalize the ambiance and serenity of my views from the cockpit.
Mostly taking pictures at night, I use long shutter-times ranging from one to 20 seconds as I place my camera in a window frame or let it rest on a headrest. Fortunately, the Boeing 747 is a very stable airplane, and using wide-angle lenses allows for a tiny bit of movement, yet still end up with sharp images.
56 NORTHWEST AEROSPACE NEWS