It's not everyday one gets to watch an E-4 do touch and go practice. It happens once in a while at Cedar Rapids as they come over from Offut AFB to practice instrument approaches and touch and goes in the pattern for a while. It's been six years since their last visit, but on Wednesday we had an E-4 hanging around for an hour.
There are only four E-4s built, and I previously had two of them, although they were 35mm slides and photos, which I scanned in for posting. Now I have a digital camera. Wednesday I got to see a third one and was able to photograph 5 touch and goes, getting 85 shots.
I'm posting less than half. The first pass was shot from the catwalk around the control tower using 450mm lens. Then I went downstairs for the rest of them and used a 300mm so I wouldn't have to try to get it pulled back so far quickly, since the plane fills the viewfinder. On the fourth pass I decided to use 450mm again and let it fill the viewfinder just for fun. WOW. On the 5th pass I went back to 300.
He had been in the IFR pattern for about 30 minutes before I got to shooting him, and then he was still around for a while but I had to get back to work.