Absolutely right Dave. It looked wonky to me but its real.
The thing that confused me most was the accompanying "dramatic" text which appeared to indicate that the aircraft had rotated at the very last minute just barely avoiding disaster. This was a load of crap, as I will show you shortly.
The other confusing elements were visual. Immediately behind the rotating aircraft we see a line of mature trees. Assuming by the text that the picture was taken at the end of 36L (approach for 18R), I just could not explain the trees.
The only place where a mature tree line could appear is the crop of trees on the left of the runway about where the third exit is located.
There are no trees anywhere near either end of runway 36L/18R.
So this led to a lot of checking using both Google maps and Google Earth (using the "flying" mode) + some web searching.
What a surprise to find that the original image was actually taken by a photographer who is one of my contacts on FLICKR.
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As per his explanation....
This picture was taken in the weekend that air traffic at Amsterdam airport suffered many delays. The reasons were technical problems in the Air-Traffic-Control system and weather. When I went to the airport I hoped to make photo’s of weird looking cross-wind landings on runway 06 and sun-lighted aircraft in front of dark skies. I got what I wanted. Before going home I paid a “visit” to runway 36L. At the “Ijweg”road. I knew when using enough tele-mm’s this place can result in interesting pictures. Although I was “disappointed” about the position of the sun I gave it a try. I prepared a fast shutter speed using iso 400. Fortunately a 747 was taking off. The rotation point was early, and the runway was still wet. I like the result. But never expected to reach the most-interesting-of -7-days and I realize it may take a long time to make another shot like this one. I put the photographers-place on the flick-map. And a little secret revealed: the horizontal distance between the fence and the 747-wing is 145 meters.
So here is a pictorial explanation of my analysis. VR indicates the point at which the aircraft rotated, which is absolutely nominal for a loaded 747. That bit about "disaster averted", "CG envelope" etc. is pure rubbish!
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Cheers!
FulcrumDB1
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