Photo of the Day #231: Laughing Gull

Wow. The only time I ever flew at that angle, I was a passenger in a U.S. Navy aircraft training plane on a proper training flight, and my task was to compare real navigational radar images with the ones produced by my company's pilot/navigator-training simulators.

The very photo triggers faint nausea in memory of a flight, two decades ago, on which I upchucked more material than I thought a stomach could hold. The Navy instructors were a bit put out that a civilian engineer might be so _unreasonably_ susceptible to airsickness. Funny how 3-G acceleration with a window view of a perfectly vertical ocean surface, followed by moments of near free-fall, can do that. At least there were airsickness bags handy.

In the end, I did fix our simulator so that it accurately mimicked the performance of the aircraft radar. Then I went back to the office and told my boss that if he asked me to do that again, I'd resign.

Nice closeup! I hadn't noticed before that the gull appears to be using its feet to help control the aerobatics - perhaps compensating for the horizontal pull from the wings? Exaptation in action!