Free Image Gallery — Pilatus PC-12 Aircraft

DESCRIPTION	Pilatus PC-12 Single Engine aircraft N567AF at Lake Norman Airpark
DATE	June 2021
CAMERA & LENSES USED	Olympus OM-D E-M5
PHOTOGRAPHER	[email protected]
LICENSE	CC-BY-NC-SA

The images in this gallery are free for personal, non-commercial use under the terms of my Free Media License Agreement. Click on a thumbnail to enlarge.

The Pilatus PC-12 is my favorite plane and has been since I first saw one in the air a few years before I finally met this one–up close and personal on the ground in North Carolina. What a gorgeous plane, and very safe, reliable and fuel efficient. Spooling up it just sounds so surreal. This is the story of how I met N567AF, which had just landed at Lake Norman Airpark as I was also arriving for a random photo shoot and a walk to get some exercise.

It was mid-pandemic and I was laid off. We were traveling across the country and became stuck in a hotel that was in the epicenter of that crazy gasoline shortage when the pipeline was hacked. We woke up in Charlotte after traveling all night and were immediately quarantined with Covid we caught at some point during our two week unplanned stay in Illinois. Covid really messed me up and I was looking for easy places to go walk around for some exercise that were interesting in some way, and good places to learn how to take better photos.

I had found Lake Norman Airpark on a sectional during a search specifically for taking pictures of interesting small planes. 14A was only about a 45 minute drive and did not disappoint. I made several trips during my 5 month stay in the Charlotte area.

The folks at 14A were very kind, and allowed my partner and I to walk around the perimeter of the airfield once they were certain we knew the hazards and would stay away from moving aircraft. It’s about a 2.3 mile walk around the perimeter trail, surrounded by private homes, many with aircraft outside and in hangars. So many cool planes here and I was super happy they didn’t care if I took photos.

These are just a few untouched, slightly downsized photos from the day N567AF landed. I knew immediately what it was and I got pretty excited. Quest Diagnostics flies a whole fleet of these around to ferry body parts and blood samples for lab analysis. It’s just a really cool plane and I was so happy to get to see one on the ground.

I have many more photos of this plane and some video, but I was very early in learning how to take decent photos and videos of moving planes (newsflash: still not great at it), so I need to sift through them and post the decent stuff.

I took so many photos during that time, learning different techniques and F Stop and all that fun photography stuff I’ve forgotten half of, that I wore the shutter mechanism on my Olympus out and I had to perform some very delicate repairs. Well worth it.

Anyway… N567AF had a woman in the left seat and that was just the icing on the delicious cake that was meeting my first Pilatus PC-12.

@katt

Full-size original images available