Most often I'd rather get up at a reasonable hour and hang around eating breakfast, as Nellis on any morning is particularly bad in respect to the lighting conditions.
I hadn't shot the resident "Janet" jets since they switched from the classic 737-200s to the newer 600 versions, so with this in mind it spurred me to make the additional effort. The aircraft are owned by the Department of the Air Force and operated by defence contractor EG&G.
"Janet" is the callsign these aircraft use when they fly in and out of McCarran every morning with an official destination given as the Tonopah Test Range. In reality they mostly fly to Groom Lake or Area 51 as it's commonly called. Janet is said to be an acronym standing for Just Another Non Existent Terminal as their terminal is discreetly tucked away in a part of the airport that is difficult to see from the outside, but this is just conjecture.
If the departing runways are the 1s then the multi-story car park is an excellent place to shoot from with the added interesting backdrop of the many hotels on the Las Vegas strip. The majority of the photos here are taken with a 500mm lens but a shorter lens can also be used easily enough.
Most of the airliner movements are dominated by Southwest and like any civilian airliner shooting it eventually become tedious, akin to shooting fish in a barrel.
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