CARGOPILOT
- Aviation Photography By Christiaan Van Heijst
“ In heaven Seeing the entire world in my job ,
I feel privileged to be in a position to capture many different parts of the planet through my camera and immortalize the beauty of the places I visit .”
Northern lights , thunderstorms or the Himalayas ; the views from the cockpit of an airliner are never the same . Flying as a pilot on the Boeing 747-400 and 747-8 Freighters , I consider myself privileged to fly all over the world and combine that with my second passion , photography .
Endless and ever-changing landscapes of mountains , deserts , oceans or cloudscapes are passing by my windows and just ask to be captured before they are gone for good . Armed with a professional camera kit in my flight-bag , I find great joy in capturing my views and sharing them with the world — amazing views that are unique and never to be seen again . I just feel I have to preserve them .
With my first job as a pilot on a small turboprop , I found myself flying in Africa and Afghanistan for various local operators and airlines . Immediately I realized a need to document those adventures because they were simply so unique .
Now , 15 years later on the Boeing 747 , my photography has grown parallel with my flying career . In the beginning I used to be happy shooting general cockpit photos , but I started to see a challenge in capturing the delicate atmospheres of night flights — the hardest to capture from a small flight deck with its thick windows .
Dancing northern lights , the Milky Way , violent thunderstorms , reflections from the moon in little lakes and rivers on the ground … it ’ s nearly impossible to tell other people who don ’ t have access to the cockpit of an airliner , how incredibly beautiful the world is when seen from high above . But with my camera and years of experience in aerial photography , I have now reached a point where I can immortalize the ambiance and serenity of my views from the cockpit .
Mostly taking pictures at night , I use long shutter-times ranging from one to 20 seconds as I place my camera in a window frame or let it rest on a headrest . Fortunately , the Boeing 747 is a very stable airplane , and using wide-angle lenses allows for a tiny bit of movement , yet still end up with sharp images .
56 NORTHWEST AEROSPACE NEWS