Houston, Texas.

Since Wednesday, I’ve been in Houston assisting Texas Wing and other states capture images used in damage assessment in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Six members of the North Dakota Wing headed south to provide some relief for flight crews from more local states to take a break from the solid grind of generating thousands of daily photographs for analysis. Yesterday morning, our crew readied the aircraft I’ve been flying since leaving North Dakota last week.

Our departure even hit the local news. You can watch the video clip here.  Our crew consists of myself as pilot, Shawn Huizenga as observer and Casey DeVos is our aerial photographer. The other flight crew from North Dakota consists of Chad Smith, Leonard Laporte, and Travis Partin. In a future post, I’ll tell you a bit more about our assignments and share a few photos I’ve taken… only photos that have been cleared by FEMA for release. We have strict privacy protections for what can and cannot be shared via the media. For more information and background on our specific assignment, Civil Air Patrol Headquarters has cleared the following news item here.

About the photo: While Shawn kept busy in the cockpit loading our flight plan into the electronic cockpit in our aircraft, I did the exterior preflight in preparation for our departure for the morning’s flight over Houston. I stopped for a moment to capture an image of the craft that brought us here and has covered many miles over Texas at 1,000 feet (304 m) above the ground while we complete our assignments.

John Steiner