Happy Thursday.  I grabbed a sandwich yesterday and headed out with my camera for my lunch hour.  There were high puffy clouds in the dark blue sky so it was a great time to find something to shoot.

I was looking for some wildlife or a barn that I haven’t shot before.  The problem is that for last few years I have made images of almost all the interesting barns around the Maquoketa area.  I was coming back into town feeling like a wasted trip when I glanced over at the Maquoketa airport and saw a large plane sitting on the tarmac.  I need to check this out I said to myself.

This is a Mitsubishi MU-2 Solitaire (MU-2B-40) twin-engine turbo prop owned and operated by Chartair out of Maquoketa, Iowa.  I talked with the attendant at the airport who said that I could photograph the airplane.  When the pilot started the right engine he ran the throttle up to full speed for a long time.  The noise was deafening and I wondered what would happen to us (standing there) if one of those blades broke off.  🙂  Then he did the same thing to the left engine.  In the image above he is just starting the left engine and the right engine is running so fast that I could only see the faintest outline of the prop.

It didn’t take long once he was airborne to get out of sight.  The attendant told me that it would be just a few minutes and he would land in Cedar Rapids and pick up his passengers and then it was a couple of hours flight to Boston Massachusetts.  I asked him why he ran the engines up so high for such a long period of time.  His comment was that he had to build up the oil heat and pressure because if he didn’t it would cool too quickly at the higher altitude and create a problem for the engine and ultimately for the airplane.  😦

So you never know what you’re likely to find when you have a camera in hand and need a picture for your daily 365 project.  Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your Thursday and be careful.