Selected Finalists From Aviation Week's 2018 Photo Contest

A 20-sec. exposure of two performers during the Experimental Aircraft Association night air show over Wittman Regional Airport, Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

A Boeing E/A-18G Growler sits with its wings folded on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) as the Sun rises on yet another day of air operations in the Atlantic Ocean.

An early morning flight over southeast Tennessee captures the Sun's rays peaking through the early morning cloud coverage.

Four warbirds, a P-51 Mustang, P-40 Warhawk, FG-1D Corsair and P-63 Kingcobra, fly at the Geneseo, New York, air show.

N258FE, a Boeing 727-200 freighter, gleams in the Sun at the W.K. Kellogg Airport in Battle Creek, Michigan. This aircraft flew with Air Canada in the 1970s before being converted to a freighter for FedEx. In 2011, FedEx donated the aircraft to Western Michigan University for use in their maintenance program.

Swiss Air Force Pilatus PC-6 Turbo Porter from Transport Squadron 7 lands in a cornfield in central Switzerland. The squadron has mainly militia pilots who also fly airliners as their day jobs.

A KLM Boeing 787-9 is captured on the ground at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

SkyShip Co.  balloon pilot Gelbart oversees inflation of a massive balloon at Kichwa Tembo, Maasai Mara, Kenya.

SpaceX's long-awaited heavy-lift rocket, the Falcon Heavy, makes its debut flight from historic Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in February 2018. LC-39A previously hosted the inaugural flights of both the Saturn V in 1967 and the space shuttle in 1981.

The weather is always fickle when it comes to hot-air ballooning, and the Freedom Balloon Festival in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, in May was no exception. Only one of the festival's four days was calm enough to allow for a late evening "balloon glow," where dozens of teams inflated and illuminated their balloons for the assembled crowd. 

Katrina Hong watches an aircraft make a low-altitude flyby at the Chicago Air and Water Show on Aug. 18.

New Resolution Geophysics' two Pilatus Porter PC-6 aircraft create reflections while on survey in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The crew were busy with early-morning calibrations for the day's flight after the rainstorms had cleared.

"Sitting on the balcony of my hotel room at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport," photographer Maryann Miller writes, "I was able to watch aircraft take off and land. Late in the evening, the lights came on for maintenance of this Delta Air Lines jet."

PlanetVac takes off during a NASA Flight Opportunities campaign on Masten Space Systems' Xodiac vertical-takeoff-and-landing rocket in Mojave, California.

A Vans RV-4 with graphics by Dream Scheme Designs leaves DuPage Airport in West Chicago, Illinois, for a sunset flight.

It was a beautiful evening for an air-to-air photo shoot near Longmont, Colorado, with this stunning DC-3.

Swiss F/A-18C Hornets release flares over Davos, Switzerland, in the buildup to the World Economic Forum in January 2018. The Swiss Air Force provides combat air patrol for the whole eastern section of Switzerland during the summit.