Ed Hicks RV Photography

Ed Hicks RV Photography
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Ed lives in Bristol, UK and is very good at taking air to air photos of RV's. He's been kind enough to let me showcase some of his photography on the www.VansAirForce.net. As I receive new images I will post them here.

New York 2005

...all photographs here by Ed Hicks

Ed Hicks "Far From Homecoming Tour"
...scanned by Scott Jordan [n733jj at verizon.net]
Here is a brief description of Ed Hicks Northeast tour. I called it the "Far From Homecoming Tour".

Ed usually goes to Vans Homecoming on Labor Day weekend where he does much of the shooting for Vans calendar. He has also done some photo shoots for the Air Venture Cup in the past. After working with Ed several times as both subject and photo ship, I asked him about coming east some time to shoot RV's. This year, Vans had to cancel the fly-in due to runway construction so Ed contacted me about visiting NY as we had discussed. This would give East Coast aircraft that can not normally make the trip West a chance to make the calendar. I sent out numerous e-mails and made numerous phone calls to be sure we had enough aircraft to photograph to make it worth the effort.

Ed arrived Friday afternoon at the start to the long weekend. Saturday morning we flew a couple planes down the Hudson River for a shot with Lady Liberty as a backdrop. It was very rough down there and a difficult photo shoot for Ed and all the pilots. It required solid formation skills but I had the best formation pilots I know on my wing for this first flight. It went well but we decided not repeat the shoot with the less experienced pilots that day. We did some local flying and got some great shots of the other planes.

That night, I took Ed to his first ball game. Have you ever tried to explain baseball to someone? We have a lot of silly little rules in that game! I even had to explain a balk and the infield fly rule to him and, nobody really understands those!

Sunday we decided to relax and went to Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. We enjoyed the museum and the flying. It was to windy for the WWI aircraft to fly but the corny skit went on with only minor modifications. Ed enjoyed the show, said the brits are too stuffy to do anything like that.

Monday we flew to Plymouth MA to shoot some more aircraft along the coast. When the weekend was done, we had shot eight individual RV's and some formations as well as a Thorpe, a Glassair III and a Defiant. I got to fly the defiant for the photo shoot, my first canard! An interesting plane, I hope to fly it again and learn more about it. We got some spectacular shots.

I had to work on Wednesday so on Tuesday, I flew Ed up to Niagara Falls where he stayed with RV-6 builder Steve Dinieri, hoping to do some more photo shoots with local RV's. None of the expected aircraft showed up so Ed spent a couple days playing tourist around the falls and had a good time. Friday, Steve flew Ed to Oswego, NY on lake Erie. Oswego is the site of a large RV fly in the weekend after Labor Day. A good weather weekend generally produces around 50 RV's. Mark Cigal flew up to organize the photo shoots and serve as photo platform. They shot five more aircraft on Saturday.

Back in Poughkeepsie, Ed and I flew a local sight seeing / air to ground photo flight Monday before rushing off to Newark for his flight home. We shot a couple lighthouses and planed to shoot some of the NH mountains but the haze got thick so we called it a day.

All in all, a successful trip for Ed even though it required a lot of moving around. He should have plenty of photos for the calendar though we were not able to get any RV-10's. Everyone involved had a great time. Can't wait to see the "East Coast" version of Vans calendar!

Scott A Jordan