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Without a shadow of a doubt

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A U.S. Air Force pilot looked down at the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovered over the Central Continental United States Feb. 3, 2023. Recovery efforts began shortly after the balloon was downed. (Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense)

From movie magic to high speed reconnaissance to a casual biplane hop, sometimes the best photo of the day isn’t of an airplane, but rather of its sun-blocking presence in shadow.

Let’s start with one of the most stunning military photos of 2023, when the U.S. Air Force sent a high-altitude U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane aloft to check out a Chinese balloon as it floated across the United States in February of last year.

In an image freighted with symbolism, the U-2 pilot brought back a photo from the cockpit of his reconnaissance jet, clearly showing the long slim fuselage of his U-2 in shadow across the white balloon. The photo was taken on Feb. 3.

The next day, after the balloon had traversed the United States, an Air Force F-22 fired a single Sidewinder missile that downed the lighter-than-air craft at an altitude said to be between 60,000 and 65,000 feet.

Still in the photo reconnaissance domain, we have a famous 1965 Vietnam war image of a bombed bridge in North Vietnam, captured on film by an extremely low-flying Air Force RF-101 Voodoo recon jet that captured its own unmistakable shadow on film. Reconnaissance Voodoos also showed the world evidence of Soviet missiles arriving in Cuba in 1962.

The shadow of a high-speed RF-101 reconnaissance jet is clear as the aircraft photographs evidence of the destroyed My Duo highway bridge in North Vietnam; April 1965. (US Air Force photo)

Somewhere there’s gotta be a movie promotional photo out there that shows one of the great inside jokes in aircraft shadows on film.

In the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, an errant B-52 Stratofortress races over the arctic on its way to a Soviet target. What appears to be the big jet bomber’s shadow is visible in several scenes that were made by using a detailed B-52 model against backdrop footage filmed over arctic areas.

Closer inspection shows that flying shadow to be an older B-17 Flying Fortress. A French survey Fortress flew and filmed the footage, and its shadow appears onscreen as the much larger swept-wing B-52 Stratofortress is on camera, casting a shadow of a doubt about its veracity.

Sit back and enjoy a review of airplane shadows. How many can you identify before you read the captions?

The shadow of the Voodoo overlays this image of Soviet personnel and six missile transporters at Casilda port in Cuba on Nov. 6, 1962. (Photo from the National Security Archive at George Washington University – Department of Defense)
From the late 1960s and beyond the next decade, Boeing’s 727 trijet narrow-body jetliner cast a ubiquitous shadow across domestic travel routes. The 727’s clean-wing and T-tail airframe is shown to advantage in this takeoff view, circa 1980. (Photo by Frederick A. Johnsen)
It was a spontaneous lark of a flight from Renton to Boeing Field around 1968, when the owner of a blue-and-yellow Waco UPF-7 biplane saw me and my brother eyeing it as he rolled it out of his hangar at Renton. “Wanna go for a ride?” It was a brisk thrill for a teenager. My nerdily-available camera caught this view as we passed DC-3 airliners at Boeing Field. The curved slope of the dorsal fin in the shadow helps peg this as a UPF-7. (Photo by Frederick A. Johnsen)
Sometimes the fleeting passage of an airplane’s shadow conveys its scope, as in this vintage view of the Douglas XB-19 barreling down for a low pass over Wright Field, circa 1942. Several cars on the road are about to be in the shade at the same instant and only an instant. (Photo from the Dave Menard collection)
Viewed from a picture window in the sealed-off bomb bay of the then-Confederate Air Force Liberator, the old bomber’s right mainwheel is on an ever-converging course with the aircraft’s shadow on approach to the Harlingen, Texas, airport in October 1976. Two rounded vertical fins, and the high-aspect ratio Davis wing with extended Fowler flaps telegraph the presence of a member of the B-24 family. Nicknamed “Diamond Lil,” this is the oldest B-24 extant. And it still flies with the Commemorative Air Force. (Photo by Frederick A. Johnsen)
Lockheed’s gift to shadow watchers is the twin-boom P-38 Lightning. The shadow advancing ahead of Lefty Gardner’s white and red P-38 in this 1976 photo simplifies the Lightning into a gorgeously symmetrical tapering wing with just enough additional airframe to make it work. The Lockheed’s in good company with a silver P-47 Thunderbolt in the photo. (Photo by Frederick A. Johnsen)

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Comments

  2. Good one, Fred! The UPF-7 picture with the West Coast DC-3’s brings back a lot of
    Boeing Field memories….