We've never had an "editorial" on 1000aircraftphotos.com, so this is a milestone. But this editorial is about a more
exciting milestone... putting the 10,000th photo page on the site. As the originator of the site the task of writing
the editorial falls to me, while the honor of selecting the
10,000th photo went to my colleague and good friend, Johan Visschedijk.
When the site was launched in 1998 it seemed that achieving the ambitious goal of sharing 1,000 of my aircraft photos
would be a great milestone and so that was one of the reasons for calling this site "1000aircraftphotos.com". Not the only
reason, however. I had noticed that on aviation web pages of links to other sites the links were usually in alphabetical
order with numbers at the top. Naming the site 1000aircraftphotos.com put our link near the top of most of them.
I cannot overlook this opportunity to give credit for much of the early success of 1000aircraftphotos.com to the late K.O. Eckland,
a pioneer in aviation website circles and well-known for his Aerofiles.com.
Shortly after launching 1000aircraftphotos.com I e-mailed K.O. to ask his advice about what to do to make the site a really good one.
His reply was "keep it simple" so enthusiasts all over the world could use the site efficiently even with the least capable
equipment and the slowest connections. I remodeled the site, removing some fancy features that served no useful purpose.
The site design today continues to follow K.O.'s advice. In a sense, his giving that advice was also a milestone event.
It may surprise you to know that there was another very important milestone reached before the 1,000th photo was added in late 2000 or early 2001. I believe it was in December 2000 that W.T. Larkins,
a well-known aviation historian and photographer, e-mailed me to offer some of his photos for the site. His first photo on the
site was No. 909. This was a milestone because after seeing some of
his photos on the site, other enthusiasts with photo collections made similar offers. The site snowballed from then forward,
and to this day we have received photo and information contributions from more than 450 individuals. We consider every new
contributor to 1000aircraftphotos.com to be a new milestone.
A very important milestone of that kind occurred in 2003, when Johan Vischedijk offered his photo collection for the site. After
I added some of his photos and changed some of the supporting information he supplied, Johan e-mailed one day to request (demand?)
that I stop altering the information he supplied with the photos. That very day I offered Johan to be in charge of the information
content of the site, and he accepted. That milestone marked the beginning of 1000aircraftphotos.com being recognized as a source
of accurate information as well as interesting aircraft photos.
Johan and I have not yet set the next milestone because we have some counting to do. We believe
1000aircraftphotos.com is well on the way to become one of the aviation web sites with the largest number of photos
of different aircraft types. Once we do an analysis and can say with confidence just how many different aircraft there
are on the site now, we will set a goal of some higher number and strive to reach that next milestone. 10,000 aircraft
types might be a little ambitious.
Due to generosity of our many contributors we have an inventory of many thousands of images, continually growing,
from which we select the photos to add to the site each update. Many hundreds of them are of aircraft not pictured
on the site today. We will concentrate in the future on adding photos of aircraft not already pictured on the site. A
second preference is to add more photos of historical significance. However, we will also continue to add photos of
types already on the site so we can keep our contributor's collections growing, and satisfy the desire of many
enthusiasts to see new examples of the types of planes they like best.