I had been asked over the weekend to take a look Monday at the airplane parked under a white tent outside City Hall for a couple of days.
The aircraft is a salvaged single-engine Cessna attorneys brought to City Hall in hopes of using it in a civil-litigation case stemming from a 2005 plane crash in Idaho. The Common Pleas Court Judge hearing the case has yet to approve the attorney's request, which would take jurors to the heated tent to watch a simulation of the plane's final movements before the crash.
I just thought it looked intriguing. Hardly any one of the passersby even gave it a second glance. I waited, but nobody stopped to stick their face up against the clear plastic walls for a better look. Me, this is the kind of stuff I love photographing. The morning sun hadn't yet cleared the buildings to the east, but it was reflecting off the glass of buildings to the west, so the whole plaza of City Hall was mottled by the bounced light.
I was watching people walk by when a handful of lawyers entered the tent, and just as I started focusing through the plastic someone approached me. "You with the newspaper? You can probably get inside." I answered that I kind of liked the soft effect of the plastic - that it accentuated the weirdness of the whole scene, and was just waiting for the figures inside to line up beter against the windows. "No," he continued, "the airplane, that's the story. Product liability."
I asked if he was a lawyer. "Yeah, but not like these guys. They're way beyond my pay grade."