If you find yourself in danger of being excessively productive, I highly recommend visiting airliners.net and clicking one of the "Most Popular" links.
Every now and then, the most popular pics of the last X days will turn out to be particularly notable.
I just checked out the "last 7 days" listing, and found B-29 wreckage on a glacier in Alaska, the Caspian Sea Monster, an F-16 playing chicken with a tanker, a Hind heading off to kill someone, a very dramatic shot of an F-14's tailpipe, Concordski (previously mentioned in passing here) in repose, the first Qantas A380 still in primer, a fantastic view of the devices with which the TU-95 tortures its crew, a skeletal Sabre, a UFO and another one, one mighty Blackburn Beverley, and a ridiculously luxurious toilet.
9 February 2008 at 8:31 am
The scrapping of the Starship fleet was a tragedy. They were such beautiful birds. Most are parked in Arizona waiting to be chopped up.
Bert still flies one, I think. I suspect Raytheon won't be buying that one back.
9 February 2008 at 10:01 am
This one has a certain "went so fast I broke physics" feel about it...
10 February 2008 at 4:52 am
Tut tut, you'd get no spotter points in our office - that's not the 'Caspian Sea Monster', thats a Project 903 Lun
Missile Launcher Ekranoplan. Mind you we have people who can spot aircraft landing on the airfield from the sound on approach. It's a... special place.
10 February 2008 at 9:20 am
Err ... Pittance,
From your own link:
"This machine, which American intelligence organizations dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster ..."
10 February 2008 at 4:53 pm
No, he's right - it's a Lun-class ekranoplan, with missile launching tubes on its back and a flat tailplane, while the KM-class with a V tailplane was the one originally dubbed the Sea Monster.
You could be forgiven for mistaking them for each other when either had just flown over your dinghy at dot feet and 300 knots, though :-).
14 February 2008 at 12:47 pm
An equally time-consuming site about aviation is AirDisaster.com. Try plugging the name of every aircraft seen above into their database and see what pops up.