This isn’t a cool “I stumbled upon and caught this in the moment” story, it was a deliberately staged scene for the August 2018 edition of Sport Aviation.
I knew going into the shoot that this would be a fold-out cover. Shooting for a landscape-oriented cover would certainly be easier, but the goal was to have it look intriguing as a single page normal cover as well. That’s a bit trickier!
The visualization process was definitely the most challenging part. Most people assume (myself included at one time) that the P/F-82 Twin Mustang is more or less just two P-51 Mustangs joined together. The reality is that it was a clean-sheet design and the airplane is much larger than its predecessor. In fact the Twin Mustang shares only a handful of the same parts as the P-51. Prior to this photoshoot I had been able to photograph one of the surviving F-82s Betty Jo in person multiple times. Knowing the actual, surprisingly large size of the airplane helped tremendously in visualizing how I wanted the shot to turn out.
You might ask why a night run? Aside from it being able to see the stars and having a different atmosphere than your standard daytime photo, the biggest part is the exhaust. The XP-82 is powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce Merlins that under the cover of darkness provide a spectacular blue flame when run at high power.
On the day of the shoot, the airplane was brought outside toward the end of the day for group photos of Tom Reilly and his crew. After we finished with the group photos, Tom and crew towed the airplane to a part of the ramp where the background was largely unobstructed. Watching the sun set behind the airplane with the whole crew was a great experience. The airplane had never been more complete and, after 10 years of exhausting work, the crew seemed to be soaking in the beautiful sight of their airplane basking in the warm sunset.
As the sun got lower and lower, the crew was anxious to start the night run, but there was still a considerable amount of orange light in the sky from the sunset, which I knew would result in too bright of a photo. What a lot of people don’t realize is how extraordinarily powerful modern digital cameras are. I wanted to wait until it was practically dark — or even fully dark for that matter.
Finally, once I felt it was properly dark, Tom fired up the right-hand engine and I immediately clicked off the first exposure. I was happy with the settings on the camera so, after a few exposures, the only other adjustment I made was to a lower angle on the airplane. At the lower angle, my first photo had captured both engines with the blue exhaust flame. Knowing that photo was probably the one I experimented with a couple different camera settings and then let the crew know I was done.
What I like most about the photo is that it conveys what that experience was like in person — a two-headed, fire-breathing monster chained to the ground. The engines were so loud it seemed to be only white noise in my ears by the end. I could feel the sound in my chest — it was tremendous.
