In the city of Villavicencio, Colombia, airport code VVC, resides one of the few surviving Catalinas in the world. Her story would make good material for a movie, if movies today were about a story and not special effects.

You can read it here.

With many thanks to Javier Franco Topper and Michael S. Prophet.

You might call it an elite’s sport, a billionaire’s toy or whatever, but the truth is, when you have a 90+ ft long monster yacht sailing at 33 knots and leaving barely any wake, it’s so graceful you just shut up and enjoy the show.

You read that right.

As I understand it, a DC-3 single-pilot type rating would be ok to fly this bird. Also, with the optional ferry tanks you can get over 2,000 nm range. And it looks fantastic to boot.

If it really can be flown SP, I’m sold.

The biopic of Amelia Earhart with Hillary Swank, Richard Gere, Ewan McGregor and Christopher Eccleston.
OK first off I’ll admit that I’m biased in that there are gorgeous scenes of vintage flying machines and that automatically rates it above average for me, but although it’s not as bad as some critics say, it’s still indeed rife with inaccuracies and I get the feeling, while I enjoyed it, that it’s a missed opportunity.
Mira Nair is no Scorsese, and her Amelia is far from being the parallel to The Aviator that it certainly had the potential to be. Her film seems to go through the motions, when Earhart’s life was so extraordinary for her times that this production could have been much, much more.

I also get the feeling it would have been a better movie without stars. Gere and Eccleston admittedly pull the best performance of the lot, but the latter is the only one I saw as Noonan. Speaking of whom I’m glad they didn’t the easy way and portray as a drunkard he’s so unfairly often thought as. The others I saw as themselves playing the part.

All in all, it’s an average, it’s nice but dull, it lacks life. What saves it is the score and above all, the film’s splendid photography. The scenes of the Electra flying over Africa are dreamy.

Here’s the L12 they use to stand in for Amelia’s L10:

Beautiful, isn’t it?

It’s a rocky path but I keep walking.

When I got home and unloaded my SD card, I realized I had taken 456 pictures. In the space of like 6 hours over the two days. Thanks to burst mode for fast snapshots! I’d say about 100-150 or so are actually good enough to be posted here, I’m still sorting through them. I also have about about 1h40 of HDV footage that I have to edit and although I didn’t bring the tripod and it’s a tad shaky-camy in places (hey it’s aerobatics!), I’m pretty happy with the raw results.
I’ll post the vids on YouTube when it’s done.

Yep. Right now I’m Barneyfied, everything’s awesome, and this weekend was LEGEN-wait for it…

DARY!

More pics

Funny, there’s a good chance I went on TV yesterday evening as they were broadcasting live for Thalassa. Smashing, baby!