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Lingering black skies: The coastal fog is moving in from the San Francisco Bay while one of Southwest's over 200 Boeing 737-300s approaches on an afternoon schedule to the Silicon Valley's principal city.

What gives the not especially thick clouds their dramatic appearance is purely due to the time of the day and its low angle of light. Salekhard sits right on the Arctic circle, and the time is around 11:00 pm which means that the sun is about to briefly dive to the horizon in about half an hour.

At SAS, the MD-fleet was later beefed up further with eight of the designated next-gen successor MD-90-30, and counting these family relatives in, brought SAS up on-par with the Italian carrier.

Lingering black skies: Parked on one of the open stands in the Northwestern corner of the main apron, RA-85514 is waiting for her evening return flight to her name-giving home base of Chelyabinsk, a city in Western Siberia at the foot of the Ural mountains. Nicely enough, ground crews had removed all equipment during her extended parking period for a use elsewhere on the field, thus a clean shot of her could be obtained any time the sun broke through the rather low cloud base.

With her day-long rest between her overnight assignments, it was more a matter of patience than of luck to wait for a brief moment of light on an otherwise rather untypical overcast and drizzly Utah morning.

Lingering black skies: JAL's afternoon schedule from Fukuoka into Hongkong typically consisted of one of the carrier's DC-10-40, a variant of the popular trijet powered by Pratt & Whitney JT9D-engines. With JAL and Northwest Orient being the only customers of the -40, the success of that version was rather limited, with only 42 units built. The competing DC-10-30 with General Electric CF6-50 engines was much more widely sold, with 206 commercial units plus 60 military KC-10 tanker/transports built.

Still, another trip to Florida during said season is not on the author's bucket list, the amount of frustration with goodies passing in a downpour or just seconds after the sunshine quit was a bit too substantial...

Taxying to her gate just in time before the approaching storm front hits, the A310 of Lufthansa's short-lived in-house low-cost-branch Lufthansa Express is a substitute visitor for the usual mainline Boeing 737-300 scheduled for the service between Frankfurt and Zürich.

Its fleet of Antonov 12 transports however soon found a new home with a successor company that had a bit more of success, Air Sofia, who carved itself a niche offering ACMI work in the freight and courier business specifically.

Proudly displaying her then pretty recent multicolor scheme replacing the classic fir green of Transavia, and with deicing procedures completed, PH-TVC starts up her engines for the return sector of a classic weekend ski charter service from the Netherlands to the Austrian Alps.

When the German leisure airline Germania took delivery of its new Boeing 737-700s, acquired early on in the production run (D-AGEO above is line number 17, e.g.), it painted several of the aircraft in promotional liveries of tour operators it contractually cooperated with. One of these partners was 1-2-Fly, a subsidiary of TUI specifically catering for leisure travel needs of families, young couples and singles with a budget.

Ukraine's paramilitary organisation TSOU operated a skydiving center on a grass strip North of Odessa, near the village of Naberezhne. Besides a batch of tranished or neutral white Antonov 2 bi-planes, UR-BSM with its rainbow colors and English Skyporter titles literally stood out of the crowd. Also note the matching paintjob on the wheel base.

Many of the former PeoplExpress aircraft Continental Airlines acquired through the merger of the failed low-cost-pioneer in 1986 would retain a hybrid color scheme for several years, with some of the Boeing 727s still telling of their PeoplExpress legacy even way into the 1990s.

What began as a twice-weekly service with Boeing 747-200s using a mid-Pacific stop in Papeete to do the necessary refuelling gradually increased to a daily operation when the carrier's Boeing 747-400 fleet arrived. The -400 could cross the Pacific without need for refuelling on a 14hrs+ non-stop-leg from LAX to AKL, allowing the whole rotation to be completed in two and a half days (!). You'd e.g. be starting out in Auckland on NZ1 late on a Monday night, arrive in LAX - thanks to the international date line in the Pacific Ocean - the same Monday in the late morning, and continue to London in the afternoon - following an extended stopp for crew change, refuelling, resuplying and servicing the aircraft while the passengers had to complete the necessary (and honestly not really meaningful) US immigration only to be allowed/hearded back through customs into the international terminal - so that you'd arrive in London-Heathrow on Tuesday mornings. Returning on NZ 2 would see you leave that Tuesday well before lunchtime, for an arrival into LAX in the afternoon. With the detour through immigration/customs completed, you'd leave LAX the same Tuesday evening to arrive in Auckland on Thursday morning (crossing back over the international date line, don't forget that in your calculation). So, after some 52 hours in the air and 8 on the ground during the stops/turnaround, your Boeing 747 doing the NZ1/NZ2 run that left Auckland on Monday evening would be back home on Thursday morning.

Following over 35 years of competition between the two South Korean majors and their respective low-cost subsidiaries, Korean Air acquired Asiana Airlines and ironically is about to completely integrate the carrier and its fleet into its own operations by mid December 2026.

Say what you want, but United's classic 1970s livery looked as good on newer aircraft such as the Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 as it did on the classics like the DC-8, Boeing 727 or DC-10 it was first introduced on.

Featuring a stretched upper deck but no winglets, VH-EBV is easily recognised as one of Qantas' six Boeing 747-300 from the mid-1980s, the rarest version built of the popular wide-body. The six aircraft were gradually retired by Qantas between 2005 and 2010, with some of the birds spending their final years leased out to Indonesian carriers during the annual Hadj-season