One of the fellows here in our department recently became a licensed pilot. As is common with budding aeronauts, he spends as much time as he can in the air, and pretty much every waking moment not flying is spent thinking about flying.

Anyway, he recently took a bunch of pictures of the Sacramento area from about 14,000 feet up. Neat. Now, things like Google Maps and the general profusion of satellite and aerial images might make these seem somewhat mundane, but they’re pretty cool when you realize that flying in a small, one-engined aircraft is like being in a subcompact car far above the surface of the earth.

Having gone up in such a small plane before, I can tell you it’s way different from being in an airliner of even modest size; there’s just you, thousands of feet of free fall, and a surprisingly flimsy door keeping you from becoming a read smear lining a small crater. It’s a lot more thrilling than these images might suggest.