It was. :cool: You did watch the YouTube movies (2 posts above yours) before replying, didn't you?

Same aircraft, same airfield, different day:
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Air-C...and/1003526/L/

Yep!!
 

I watched all the youtube stuff before replying.

Did you notice the missing part of the motorbike?

Partof the picture was "messed" with. From that I dis-trust the rest of it.

:hmm:

Soggy cabbage...you're incorrect. :=

People do stop on along the shoulder to watch aircraft come in. The approach is an everyday occurence, althought this guy was lower than most. Several roads from various sides of the island converge at the top of this small mountain, which just happens to be the point of approaching a/c before they have to do a quick descent onto the airstrip at the bottom. I've never seen an approach on the opposite end, so my guess is there's one way in and one way out.

CityofFlight,

O.K. you guys. I believe it!

I just told it as I saw it!

This photoshop or not issue can often be solved by looking at OTHER things totally unrelated to the dramatic subject that is the focus.

Either the bike on the left is photoshopped in or it has a really bad front wheel.

soggy_cabbage, you asked for an professional opinion and I gave you one. That airplane was properly configured for landing and that ground clearance was perhaps (hard to judge with a zoom lens) just a tiny bit low compared to most approaches over there. No Photoshop; the anomaly on the left side of the picture is probably just a case of bad cropping.

These are not Photoshopped either:

http://www.airliners.net/photo/WinAi...ada/1078333/L/
http://www.airliners.net/photo/WinAi...ada/1154022/L/
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Untit...ada/1053560/L/

Soggy...look at the shadows. They correspond completely.

All of a sudden you as a group trust the Daily Mail.

Well, as the image is not the raw image and it has been messed with by an Adobe application (read photoshop) we will never know, will we....

;)

kind of puts short field landing into another perspective =D

Sorry. For me its got Photoshop written all over it, and watching the videos only reinforces that opinion. Perspective of the aircraft and its flight path relative to the car is a give away. And I'm familiar with the Caravan in a up close and personal kind of way. Sorry guys.

Don't know what shadows you're talking about.

If we are going to start nit-picking then there are a couple of other points to notice. (well three!)

1, Macho Man in the foreground is not looking at the aircraft. If it was that close I sure as hell would be!

2, Motorbike Guy, the one on the left with half a front wheel missing is staring straight ahead and escaping at high speed with his foot on the ground. (um his foot is missing a few toes just like his front wheel is missing a chunk)

3, The shutter speed of the camera was so fast that all three vehicles on the ground had their wheels frozen in time as they sped at great speed away from disaster.

Meanwhile, the prop on the doomed aircraft was spinning so fast it was not even a blur.....

(O.K. there is a darker patch just over the left MLG wheel)

I'm with the sceptics. Shadows of vehicles seem to run from foreground back to horizon but v.v. on aircraft (see strut shadow on fuselage cargo pod)....

I've done the odd bit of PaintShop Pro image manipulation and what Soggy says is reasonable in my experience. Further to that, if you enlarge the picture and look at the trees between the right main-gear and cargo pod, there's evidence of clone brushing. The delineation of the mountains on the right isn't as sharp as elsewhere either.

After reading this thread and looking at the various pictures and videos, I got curious, downloaded the photo, and had a really close look at it (ironically, in Photoshop). I have to agree with soggy_cabbage: there's very strong evidence that this particular picture has been, er, enhanced.

As mentioned, the left hand motorbike is missing half it's front wheel, part of the rider's foot...and, looked at critically, the line of the hedge (where it crosses the white building in the distance, is wrong.

Around the plane there are several areas where the blur/smudge tool has been used, usually a sign of covering up mismatched edges after some cut and paste: above the left main gear strut (which is also slightly darker than the surrounding area, on the fuselage just aft of the left wing and again on the fuselage near the right hand main gear strut.

Part of the rear view mirror on the foreground motorbike is missing, as is a bit of the rider's back just on his belt line.

I'd say that they've taken an already spectacular approach and moved things around/added foreground elements to make it even more outrageous.

Bobbsy

Bobbsy remarks:
"I'd say that they've taken an already spectacular approach and moved things around/added foreground elements to make it even more outrageous."

That might be a fair definition of how tabloid journalism works!

Nah, Max Tow: tabloid journalism takes the totally mundane and tries to make a story out of it without any regard for reality!

Bobbsy

Is there any special approval required for a private aircraft to be taken into St Barts.

High on my list of airports to do.

Agree with most. This is definitely a fake in my opinion. I am not a photographer, but it somehow itjust doesn't look right. I have always believed the St Maarten pictures, simply because they LOOK natural, and, in fact I visited there in December, and can confirm that they are. This is NOT real.

Also, a point that nobody else seems to have picked up is that the scooter in the foreground is obviously moving. The rider has his feet on the footrests, he is on a dirt come gravel piece of track, but WHERE IS THE DUST from the back wheel.!!!

this isn't a valid point at all, if you actually look at the scooter in the foreground you would see that the bipod support thing is extended under the scooter

I'd like to know how the plane can possibly miss the car? That's the give away for me.