Today is a holiday in Germany and of course the WDL Blimp was flying. It still didn’t come very near, but near enough to take a better shot! I also took some video, but I still have to edit and convert it.

There was another very familiar buzz in the air on Sunday: one of the Junkers JU-52 had visited our local airport on the weekend, but I caught it too late and I only managed this blurry shot. But the airplane will be back here next month and I’ll be looking out for it! Unfortunately the other JU-52 from Lufthansa is not flying at the moment because of some structual damage that is being repaired, but the two other ones from JU-Air with the Rimowa ads (I’m not sure which one is in this picture) are still in action!

It’s back! That familiar buzz was in the air today and the new WDL Blimp made its first rounds over the city after a winter pause. This is the newly built Blimp that made its debut only in Autumn of last year after its predecessor was destroyed in the big storm of 2014. The Blimp – we often call it incorrectly Zeppelin – is a real icon in our area and everyone really missed it when it was suddenly gone…

Since I don’t have a cloud shot as the final post today, here’s another kind of bird – the first photo of the year of Boeing’s Dreamliner from All Nippon Airways – the 787 has been flying from Düsseldorf since 2014 and it’s still one of the more interesting planes around here. Emirates Airways has actually been flying the A380 recently, but they never fly over our location, probably because of the noise!

With all the nature-related galleries posted, it’s time to bring out one of the fun diversions with Planespotting 2015, which was surprisingly successful last year. It turned out the Powershot SX1’s bigger zoom is ideal for catching the planes that sometimes fly right above us after starting from the nearby Düsseldorf airport. The star of the flock was ANA’s Boeing 777 ‘Dreamliner’, which has only been flying here since last year, but there are also lots of other interesting planes plus some balloons and, of course, our famous local blimp, which was completely rebuilt after it had been destroyed by the huge storm of 2014. Click on the preview photo above or the link below to go to the gallery, but you can also find a G+ version over on my Google+ Profile or the Transport Collection.

« PLANESPOTTING 2015 »

I didn’t really expect to take any photos of airplanes this year anymore, but I was trying to take some bird shots on the 24th when this grey and blue bird flew over! I forgot to look it up on Flightradar24, but from the colours it seems to be a jet from TUIFly in a new livery introduced only last year. It’s a definitive improvement, because originally their planes sported a garish yellow with blazing red writing!

I completely forgot to share the last of the three videos I shot of the blimp in late October before it went into the winter pause – this one was actually better than the others with some nice shots flying straight at the camera and then turning right at the end! Go to the Youtube version in case the playback of this locally hosted 720p video does not work – unfortunately, there have been some speed problems with my webspace lately, but I still want to provide both since the local version has a slightly better quality.

This is from October 31, the Blimp flew one more day on November 1 and now airship season is over. But they were able to fly for most of the Autumn and of course it will fly again next year in Spring!

Another Blimp video, although the first part is a little bit blurry. There’s also a Youtube version again with multiple resolutions in case the playback of this locally hosted 720p video does not work.

This photo is from two days ago and I guess this time there were really passengers in the cabin!