Geology by Lightplane

Louis J. Maher, Jr.

I was working on a closed-circuit educational television class in geology in 1966. A problem arose while I was planning the outline of some 43 lectures. Many of the available photographs and films that I wanted to use were copyrighted. Although they could be shown free to normal classes, royalties were required once they were put on video tape. I decided to solve the problem by getting a couple of cameras and spending a month in the West filming my own material. Then a happy thought occurred to me. Why not take some of the pictures from the air? I had earned a private pilot rating in 1964 and had logged about 90 flight hours. It happened that the Geophysics Section of our Geology Department owned a Cessna 170B that had been purchased for aeromagnetic research. At the time N2398D was sitting empty at a local airport, and the University of Wisconsin agreed to absorb 100 hours of flight time for the project. Graduate student and project assistant Charles F. Mansfield indicated he was willing to come along as photographer; I could not have found a more able colleague.

I have used the color film taken during the flights of 1966 long after the black and white video tapes were discarded, and I have added to the collection over the years. While it is important to have detailed ground-based slides to illustrate geological features for introductory classes, a few shots from the air help to establish their overall relationship.

These air photos have been very useful in my teaching. I think they can be useful teaching aids for others. I have copyrighted the digital image files, but I am making 360 of them available at no cost for noncommercial educational use.

The photographs at this web site are reduced to a width of 640 pixels. They are generally arranged geographically by a particular day's flight. Each picture is accompanied by a caption that provides photo identity number, geographic orientation, location, and the date it was taken. Jot down the photo identity number of any pictures that you wish to obtain. You can then download 2000-pixel-wide versions of them from our FTP site, the address of which will be provided later in this sequence.



Preflighting N2398D at Burley, ID, April 14, 1966

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Copyright © 2001 Louis J. Maher, Jr.