United Airlines had one of the truly great ad slogans of all time. After all, most people over 20 can complete the sentence; “Fly the friendly skies of …”.
I believe it struck a chord with the American psyche because almost above all else, humans want to connect. People want a pleasant ‘friendly’ experience regardless of their endeavor, but especially when they travel. The bottom line is happy employees, make friendly employees & friendly employees make customers want to return.
This is Andy. He is a Service Director and spends most of his days on the ramp gently loading thousands of pounds of luggage on to aircraft destined for far away locations. And although he works very hard, he is virtually always smiling. Just what you would expect from ‘The Friendly Skies’ of United.
Welcome to SXSW! Thousands of visitors are arriving in Austin this week for the annual SXSW Music, Film & Interactive conferences. One of the welcoming sights that gives visitors a clue of how important the music culture is in Austin is the display of giant Gibson guitars at the Austin airport baggage claim.
You can see my other ‘Music’ related photos including photos of SXSW here.
This week I’ve had a chance to play with a 16mm Fisheye. It’s been fun finding subjects that work well with this rather extreme lens. Here is a shot I took at O’dark thirty this morning of the Austin Bergstrom International Airport just as it was starting to come to life. Take a look at my other Airline & Airport photos here.
I like the B&W processing on this. I think it adds to the vintage ‘feel’ of the photo. Although, I must say the photo looks great in color as well. Perhaps I’ll post the color version at a later date…
I thought this to be an appropriate image for today since as of midnight last night, Continental Airlines public face no longer exist. There is still some behind the scenes work to be done on the merger between United Airlines and Continental Airlines, but to the flying public, there is only United Airlines. Hopefully as they are re-branding the aircraft with the new United Logo, they will keep this 737-900 with the vintage Continental logo as a tribute to the thousands of Continental employees that now are part of the new United Airlines. You can see another photograph of the Continental Airplane with the vintage Continental logo here.
The Continental Airlines 737-900 with a vintage paint job spent the night in Austin last night. This livery or paint design was featured on CO’s DC-3s back in the early 1960s. That was not too many years before I started riding my bicycle to the old Austin airport just to watch the planes take off and land. After all these years I still love airplanes. Call me a kid, or a geek, (perhaps both).
As a side note, you can see in the photo that the plane is parked at spot 12. I thought that was especially apropos since 2012 will be the last year of Continental. In fact, it’s just a matter of weeks before the public face of Continental Airlines will no longer exist as Continental is merged with United Airlines.
I’ve been doing some work this week at Sea-Tac. Every day on my walk to the airport I’ve walked past these giant granite boulders at the the entrance to the arrival hall. I wanted to attempt to capture the feeling you get as you approach the terminal. To me it’s like you are approaching a gigantic Mothership which is very apropos since Sea-Tac is a major transit point for many ship passengers departing on ships from the port of Seattle.
These are aircraft that spent the night at ABIA airport in Austin Texas and are ready to start work as the sun is about to rise.
Although I am a full time photographer, I also work part time for an unnamed airline (guess…). Some days I am greeting customers in my white shirt and tie, and on many days I’m working the ramp in my ‘village people’ outfit and get to watch the sun rise while towing the aircraft to the gates so all those travelers can fly to where they want or need to be. I’ve always been like a kid around airplanes so while the work is sometimes hard, for me the hours are short and for the virtual donation of my time I can fly pretty much any where in the world for less than the cost of a good dinner out.
This is an another photo taken while waiting through a three hour layover at the Chicago O’hare airport. You can see another photo I did in the tunnel (here).
Ahhh…. if only the airlines would work this hard to make flying a pleasurable experience…
There is this pretty amazing tunnel between the ‘B’ & ‘C’ terminals at Chicago O’Hare International airport. I was stuck at the airport on a three hour layover so I decided to go take some photos. This is actually a combination of a ten second and a six second exposure I shot by setting up my tripod on the people mover as it transported me between the terminals. If you like this image, check out another one of my photos from the same location here. I’d be curious (via your comments) which one you prefer.
Here is another image (actually two images) from the GuitarTown Gibson Guitars on display at the Austin airport. You can see my previous post about the Austin Guitar exhibit here.The guitars were originally displayed around Austin and then auctioned off as a fund raising project. It’s wonderful living in a city that celebrates & endorses it’s live music scene. Perhaps that is why Austin is known as “The Live Music Capitol of the World”
