Aftermath of the 1986 Cerritos mid-air collision—this is not going to end well…..
 
A young man in the Philippines named Allec Joshua Ibay has developed an interesting—and morbid—hobby. Using Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, Ibay likes to recreate noteworthy airline crashes from the past.

Ibay’s dedication to this hobby is impressive, with upwards of 30 such crashes now documented on YouTube. The tone is uniformly elegiac, with lachrymose music cues, but the videos also attempt to foreground useful information such as the actual dialogue between the doomed pilots and the control tower.
 

 
On some level Ibay knows that what he’s doing is creepy. The default video on his YouTube user page is a 9/11 tribute—not to worry, Ibay has done simulations of both UA Flight 175 and AA Flight 11. He seems to have gone out of his way to find FS2004 topics that are a bit less unsettling, as for instance this tribute to Heathrow or this compilation of safe landings on the island of Sint Maarten, where the airport is notoriously much too close to the beach, which has led to some fairly hilarious pictures of volleyball players confronted with a 747 jet landing almost right on top of them. (Last year we took a look at Jet Airliner: The Complete Works, a memorable book of such photos.) Ibay is currently 18, and some of these videos are more than a year old—I’d feel a little more squicked out if Ibay were in his thirties.

After the jump, some of Ibay’s greatest, er, “hits”......

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Boeing 747-400 from Amsterdam
 
I think these marvelous photographs by prominent Austrian photographer Josef Hoflehner and his son Jakob pretty much speak for themselves. They were taken at Maho Beach on the Caribbean island of St. Martin (it’s a little more than a hundred miles east of Puerto Rico)—the beach is right next to the short runway of the Princess Juliana International Airport. Since it’s on the southern, or Dutch, side of the island, it’s actually called Sint Maarten.

Josef and Jakob visited four times between 2009 and 2011, each time for about three weeks. Josef told Slate:
 

It’s an extraordinary place. There simply isn’t anything like this airport anywhere on the planet. With all the heightened security we have today, one can not get that close to a plane anywhere else without buying a ticket.

-snip-

On average, there were only five or six passengers jets coming in per day, and often there as an hour or more between the landings. It’s not like we were relaxing on the beach like other beachgoers. We had the cameras in our hands, standing on the beach, since you never know when exactly the plane is arriving. When we’d go to the restroom or go get something to drink, then the plane, which was usually late, would suddenly come in.

 
In 2012 Most Press put out a bound volume of the photographs under the title Jet Airliner: The Complete Works.
 

Corsair Boeing 747-400 from Paris
 

Delta Air Lines Boeing 757-200 from Atlanta
 

American Airlines Boeing 737-800 from Miami
 
More after the jump…

 
Sometimes the really deadpan pranks are the best ones. Waaaay back in the 1970s an artist and photographer named Mark Gubin, living near Milwaukee Airport and realizing that his abode was situated on a common approach path for landing airplanes, painted the words “WELCOME TO CLEVELAND” in huge white letters on his building’s flat and entirely black roof. For the geographically illiterate out there, Milwaukee is in Wisconsin, which does not even border Ohio, the state that contains Cleveland. (Full disclosure: Cleveland is the city in which I currently live.) The two cities are 335 miles apart as the crow flies—roughly a seven-hour drive.

Gubin painted the sign after his assistant casually remarked that, given his location, it would be nice to welcome incoming passengers to the city. But Gubin had an even better idea….

According to a 1985 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, there used to be a Northwest Airlines route from Denver to Cleveland that used Milwaukee as a layover, and the airline was obliged to pre-emptively reassure passengers via the PA system that they should not worry—the plane had not skipped the intermediate destination.

Gubin’s quotations in that article are priceless. One of them goes, “There’s not a real purpose for having this here except madness, which I tend to be pretty good at.” He also said, “It was all tongue-in-cheek, just for fun. Living in the world is not a dress rehearsal. You better have fun with it.” That’s for sure.

Lest you wonder whether a prank painted on a roof that appeared in a 2005 edition of a Milwaukee newspaper is still in force, worry not, according to Google Maps, the prank is still in full effect, as this screen shot (with a 2015 copyright) establishes (click on the picture for a better view).
 

 
via GQ