Luke AFB, AZ, USA - 20/01/2009

The first morning of our Arizonan adventure dawned on the ourskirts of Phoenix. It was a new dawn for America too, with the inauguration ceremony for President Barack Obama taking place that morning.

After breakfast we headed straight to our intended destination for the day, Luke AFB. As we arrived F-16s could be seen in the overhead recovering already!

Following a quick recce we headed to a location on the southside of the airfield that enabled us to get some shots of the Vipers getting airborne. Height and line varied a little giving a mix of nice and ugly angles.

As nice as the light was the shots were all a bit 'samey', so we headed to the northside of the airfield to check out where we could shoot recoveries from.

No parking signs have recently been erected alongside the road that runs to the north of the base which restricted options greatly. We did however find a spot that we thought would be good for late afternoon landers.

With another wave of F-16s waiting to go we shot back around to the southside, where we caught the attention of the police inside the wire.

With another batch airborne and now feeling really bored with the same angles we decided to be a tad more adventurous at the northside. We pulled well off the road down one of the tracks that litter the land around the airfield, but we'd only been there long enough to decide it wasn't working (about 30 seconds) before we were pounced upon by the base police.

They were friendly and courteous, but took our details, explained that they weren't happy with us being there and advised us to leave the area, threatening to call the local Sheriff's department if we didn't.

We weren't there to cause trouble so we respected their views and left.

Naturally this necessitated something of a change of plan as we'd intended to be there till sunset. Instead we elected to head to Buckeye to see what was there before we continued on our way to our overnight destination of Yuma.