Milo's Landing

After twenty-four hours of travel, Milo and his friends returned to the UK this morning, with a sunrise landing at Heathrow. On the journey home, the flights all lined up nicely with few delays, but it did mean the trip from Bangkok, via Singapore and Bahrain, was pretty much non-stop. But the best thing is that he's home now, hungry and full of stories, as it should be.

One of the best parts of the whole thing is that we could follow Milo's progress using the Flightradar 24 app – a fantastic tool for parents of travelling teenagers! The 3D tracking mode allows you to simulate what their plane is doing, using live navigation data and a pretty accurate model of the aircraft (a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner) combined with satellite imagery of the earth below. So this morning, I watched the plane cross the Essex coastline and fly over London before landing.

I decided to make this the subject of my Blip today. So, I took some screenshots as the flight came in, choosing a viewpoint that showed the sunrise behind the plane and the city below. You can see the river Thames curving across the landscape here. I imported them into Photoshop to add a more realistic sky (one that I photographed about a week ago). I upscaled the image with Topaz Photo AI to correct pixelation on the edges of the aircraft. Finally, I used Photoleap AI to redraw the image using the style and colours of that real sunrise.

So, the resulting image is a complete fabrication in one sense, but it realistically captures the moment of Milo's plane on landing approach in precisely that location over London.