The impulse for these photos below comes from when I was 12 years old, in the fall of 1978. On holiday with my family, the home we stayed in had the latest issue of Time Magazine with the photo (right) from the terrible crash PSA Flight 182 in San Diego, taken by Hans Wendt, a staff photographer for San Diego County. The fact that in a few days we would be flying back to our home in London probably didn't help my young, impressionable mind.

I obsessed about that magazine the whole trip, constantly sneaking peeks at the incredible image of the aircraft plunging to the ground, wing and engine on fire. A crash the year before in Tenerife of two 747, with images also published in Time Magazine, all helped feed an obsession with planes and plane crashes as a kid. Luckily there's far fewer crashes today, but in the 1970s and '80s there were numerous large plane crashes every year. I still get a thrill from flying, and have a strange fear of it, but luckily I understand statistics and probability.

The photos here were all taken in Seattle between 2014 and 2017. A period I often call my "peak-parenting" period of my career, which meant it was hard to focus on long term photo projects but I could easily slip down to one of our three major airports in and around Seattle to take photos planes coming and going for a couple of hours. Sometimes creative inspiration comes from strange beginnings.