I can’t believe I’ve never posted this photo from March – Astrophotography meets Planespotting!

This one fortunately is not a guest on our balcony, although it flies over it sometimes.
One of All Nippon Airways’ Boeing 787 taking off from Düsseldorf International.

The second-best shot of yesterday’s Junkers JU-52 visit. I’ve since looked up that this plane with the English-language advert under the wings has apparently never been here before, we were always visited by one of the other three JU-52’s from the Swiss company JU-Air and another one from the Lufthansa Foundation before. But this is in fact the one that flew to the USA in 2012 and also appeared in the 1968 movie Where Eagles Dare when it was still owned by the Swiss air foce.

Now for the better one of today’s Planespotting attempts – we had heard some familiar engine noises all weekend, but only today the Junkers JU-52 actually flew over the inner city. This was the Swiss JU-52 sponsored by a luggage manufacturing company – last time it was here, it still had a German-language advert on the wings, now it’s in English. This was the plane that flew all the way to the Oshkosh air show in 2012, but this year they were here in Mülheim this weekend :-).

Yes, this one’s a blurry mess, but I’ve never seen a jet flying over us on direct approach to Düsseldorf with the gears already down. I’m pretty sure this Lufthansa pilot was a little off course…

Actually, I have no idea if the second plane crossing the path of ANA’s 787
in the distance was a Dreamliner, too – but this looked too good to be ignored!

Yesterday, we saw something strange making its way through the sky in the distance – it flew much slower than a typical jet and had a very peculiar shape. A look at Flightradar24 confirmed my suspicion: it was one of the five Airbus A300-600ST “Beluga” transporter planes, making a trip from Hamburg to the Airbus factory in Toulouse! Unfortunately it didn’t come any closer than this.

Yesterday, this thing appeared over the inner city with a loud, whining buzz shortly after the Germany-France football match had ended. Not a good photo, more a record shot – but if this is not a quadcopter drone, I don’t know what it is! It actually hovered stationary slightly east of us and then flew off first to the North and then to the East. If it was taking photos, I’m probably in one of them standing on the balcony taking a photo of it! I wonder who was controlling this thing…

I have no idea what you were thinking flying so low directly over our heads,
Mr. Air Berlin hotshot pilot – was the runway in Düsseldorf too crowded for you? :-)

I took this photo on June 9th only a few hours before the devastating storm hit our region and amongst a lot of other things destroyed the famous WDL blimp. But today there are great news: the WDL is building a new blimp because the airship is so enormously popular around here. Sadly, they will take about nine months to do it, so they will not be able to fly in this season again – but there will be a new blimp next year and I’m sure they will name it again after their late founder Theodor Wüllenkämper, who passed away two years ago.