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.

I recorded this little video two days before the blimp was heavily damaged and almost completely destroyed in the huge storm we had on June 9th. This is not really high-quality and was just meant as an example how the blimp sounds when it’s flying overhead – you know it’s summer when you hear the familiar buzzing! I had no idea then that it would be the last chance I would get filming and photographing it :-(.

This photo is from Sunday – I just read that our famous WDL Blimp, stationed at the small Airport Essen-Mülheim, was destroyed along with its hangar by Monday’s storm. This is very sad because the company had just gotten a new sponsor and the airship is really an icon of the region. Hopefully they will be able to rebuild it, but it might be very difficult and take some time :-(.

I forgot that I had a third photo of the Piaggio P.180 Avanti we recently saw flying circles over the city. It looks even weirder from this perspective – are those LASERS? Take cover! :-)

Continuing with the flight theme of the evening (three astronauts just launched to the ISS and are already in Earth orbit!) here’s the third of the hot air balloons from Sunday. I always find it amusing to see beer advertisements on these – do they serve alcoholic beverages on board? :-)

Another photo of the very strange Piaggio P.180 Avanti we saw two days ago – from this angle, it doesn’t look so weird, but the noise sounded unlike any other plane we usually have around here!

We saw and heard this really strange plane circling three times overhead today – it looks really weird from below and the buzzing noise was so loud that we thought it might be a drone or something. But it turns out that it’s in fact a small passenger plane, a Piaggio P-180 Avanti!

I’ve heard the familiar deep engine buzz several times in the last few days and saw it flying in the distance, but only today I had a chance to take the traditional first photo of our local WDL Blimp – and they have a new sponsor this year after they had to fly “solo” just with their own logo for a couple of years. It’s terribly expensive to actually fly with it, but the “Zeppelin” is one of the trademarks of our region and it’s always great too see it flying again after the winter hiatus.