On Location with Artist in the Sky

Special thanks to Nassau Helicopters out of Princeton, NJ and the accommodating controllers at Philadelphia airport who allowed us to work near the airport in between heavy jet traffic. We worked most of the day and got a lot of projects shot.

Sometimes the weather can change pretty fast when we are working, we monitor it carefully hour by hour but occasionally we get a surprise. The Robinson R22 is not the fastest helicopter, and we were pinned in by rapidly changing conditions all around us,  too far from an airport, and did not want to land in someone’s yard. Flight watch advised conditions improving in our direction so we elected to fly through the clearest area we could see.

So we did punch through the area we thought was clearest, but still managed to get bounced around a bit. The door was off and strong crosswind was blowing rain into the cockpit trying to get the cameras wet.

Once through the rain we corrected our heading towards the target and a few minutes later we bounced back into some sunshine so we could get our shots.

Today we flew the Robinson R44 helicopter out of Peachtree-Dekalb airport with our good friends at Air Atlanta. We’ve used these guys a bunch of times over the years and we’ll give a quick tip of the hat to our ace pilot Harry Marshall. We’ve flown with him a few times. He has a good knack for getting us clearance to transition Hartsfield–Jackson airport, one of the busiest in the world, so we can often fly right over the top while jets land and depart. Weather was pretty good today and we got a bunch of projects shot around the city and out in the boonies. The R44 is a fast, comfortable machine with ground speed similar to the Cessna airplane.