Photo: Venezuelan Air Force Sukhoi Su-30MkII backseater view

I’ve found this awesome picture almost by accident.

It was published on One Big Photo, a website that makes high resolution photographs of various subjects available to everyone. Usually, aircraft pictures you can find on photo/wallpaper sites are only spectacular images already published on several aviation-related websites.

The F-15E with lightning strike in the background photo, published also on Gizmodo, is an expample of those very well known images that arrive on photo websites months after being released by the U.S. Air Force.

However, the image taken by Sergio j. Padrón from the backseat of a Venezuelan Air Force Su-30MkII flying the slot position of a four-ship formation is not only extremely beautiful and interesting, but also rarer, although it was taken (according to the author’s Flickr profile) in December 2009.

Image credit: Sergio j. Padrón via One Big Photo

About David Cenciotti
David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.