FLYING Magazine's 2027 Calendar, Jessica Ambats, and the Aviation Photography That Keeps the Dream Alive

FLYING Magazine has released its 2027 calendar, with photography by the magazine’s own editor-in-chief, Jessica Ambats. The announcement is a window into how one of aviation’s oldest publications documents the industry - and why aviation photography carries more weight for this community than most people stop to consider.

Why the Editor-in-Chief as Photographer Matters

Handing the camera to someone whose primary role is editorial is a statement of competence. It means Ambats isn’t just qualified to judge photography - she can produce it at a professional level.

Ambats is also a pilot. That combination - editorial authority, technical photographic skill, and actual flight experience - is uncommon. It shapes what ends up in the frame in ways that are real and measurable, even when viewers can’t articulate exactly why one aviation image feels authoritative and another doesn’t.

FLYING was founded in 1927, the same year Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. It has been documenting general aviation, commercial aviation, and the culture surrounding both for nearly a century. The 2027 calendar places Ambats’s work in a tradition that stretches back to the barnstorming era.

What Makes Air-to-Air Aviation Photography Technically Demanding

Most pilots who have attempted aircraft-to-aircraft photography understand immediately that it bears no resemblance to ground-based work. Both platforms are moving. The light changes with every bank angle. Haze at altitude shifts color temperature continuously.

Shutter speed decisions alone require precise judgment: fast enough to freeze a propeller at certain angles, slow enough to retain the blur that makes it look like it’s actually spinning. Shoot too fast and the prop becomes a static disc. Shoot too slow and the entire frame goes soft. These decisions happen in fractions of a second, through aircraft windows that introduce their own optical distortion, while the airframe vibrates and a formation flight is being actively managed.

The formation brief for an air-to-air shoot should mirror any other formation brief - lead/follow assignments, abort criteria, radio failure procedures. The airmanship comes first. The photography is almost secondary in the moment. If the formation isn’t being flown safely, no image is worth capturing.

What a Pilot-Photographer Sees That Others Don’t

When a pilot-photographer frames a Piper Super Cub on floats approaching a mountain lake, they already know the angle of the descent, the expected flare point, and where the aircraft will be in five seconds. They can position for the shot before the maneuver begins because they’ve already flown it mentally.

That contextual knowledge shows up in the final image even when the viewer can’t describe what they’re responding to. There is a real difference between a photograph of an airplane and a photograph of what it means to fly that airplane. Pilot-photographers close that gap - not automatically, but when it works, it’s apparent.

This is what separates professional aviation photography from competent aviation photography. The technical execution is table stakes. The understanding of the subject is what produces images that feel alive.

Aviation Photography and the Long Game of Recruiting Pilots

For general aviation, visual media does work that goes beyond aesthetics. The cost of flight training, aircraft ownership, medical certification, and regulatory currency requirements are real barriers that don’t shrink over time. For people in the years-long gap between wanting to fly and actually flying, a photograph can carry the weight of sustaining that ambition.

Pilots who had a magazine image on a bedroom wall for years before their first flight lesson are not a rare category. Student pilots who hit a rough patch in training and returned to it because they saw an image that reminded them why they started are not uncommon. That is a structural function aviation photography serves in this community, whether or not it’s discussed that way.

Social media has expanded who produces aviation imagery and who consumes it. Instagram accounts covering warbirds, spotting, experimentals, and airline operations have created entry points into aviation for people whose path didn’t start with a family connection to flying. A teenager who books a discovery flight after following an aviation photography account represents a recruitment pipeline that didn’t exist twenty years ago.

What the Calendar Actually Preserves

The photography that publications like FLYING produce is archive-quality documentation of an industry at a specific moment. The photographs from the 1960s and 1970s are historical records now - the aircraft that were common then, the airports that have since closed, the culture of flying that is difficult to describe but legible in images.

The 2027 FLYING calendar will read as current for the next twelve months. In twenty years, it will be a record of what this moment in aviation looked like. That is what professional aviation photography for major publications is actually doing, independent of whether any individual image wins an award or goes viral.

One honest observation about what tends to appear in aviation calendars: warbirds, aerobatic aircraft, floatplanes, bush planes, homebuilts with striking paint schemes. These photograph beautifully, and they earn their coverage.

What appears less often is the Cessna 172 with the oil stain on the belly, the worn paint on the spinner, and three hundred hours of student cross-countries on the Hobbs. The trainers, the rental fleets, the workhorse singles that carry most of the actual load in general aviation are photogenically unglamorous in ways that sometimes leave them underrepresented in the curated record.

The most interesting work emerging from aviation photography right now explicitly addresses this - finding the visual truth in a Cherokee with faded paint, a grass strip that hasn’t changed since the 1940s, a rural hangar where the same mechanic has worked on the same aircraft for three decades. These are the images that tell the fullest story of what general aviation actually is, not just what it looks like at its most polished.

Practical Considerations for Pilots Interested in Aviation Photography

The equipment question comes up first and is not the most important question. A modern mirrorless camera from any major manufacturer paired with a versatile zoom lens is enough to do serious work. The craft doesn’t live in the gear.

It lives in three things: light, patience, and - for air-to-air work - airmanship.

The best light in aviation photography occurs in the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. The difference between those windows and midday shooting on a clear day is not subtle. Professional photographers plan trips around these windows, not the other way around.

For ground photography, patience is the primary tool. Weather changes. Aircraft move. The light is right, then wrong, then right again two hours after you’ve nearly given up. Photographers working at a professional level have spent multiple days at an airport waiting for one frame to come together.

For air-to-air work, the most important investment is in the briefing before engines start. If the airmanship framework isn’t solid going in, the photographic opportunity ends before it begins. What happens after that is craft - knowing where to stand, when to press the shutter, and how to wait without losing attention.

Key Takeaways

FLYING Magazine’s 2027 calendar features photography by editor-in-chief Jessica Ambats, a working pilot with decades of aviation media experience
FLYING was founded in 1927 and has been documenting aviation for nearly a century; the calendar continues an archive tradition that now functions as historical record
Air-to-air photography is among the most technically demanding photographic disciplines, requiring formation airmanship, precise shutter judgment, and subject knowledge that non-pilot photographers can’t fully replicate
Aviation photography plays a structural role in pilot recruitment and retention - for many pilots, visual media sustained the ambition to fly through years of barriers before their first flight
The best light for aviation photography is the first and last hour of daylight; for air-to-air work, a thorough formation brief before departure matters more than any equipment decision
The 2027 FLYING calendar is available at flyingmag.com