Year in Pictures Out: I'm always intrigued by the combination of high technology and simple human effort.I wonder if the engineers who designed this wing ever imagined that it might function as a pushing surface. Forgetting for a moment the context provided by the caption, there's also something terribly futile about this image: that pushing a jet backward through shin deep water will never get it to fly.
Chu Yang/Zuma Press
Airport workers push an airplane out of the water in an airport in Yantai, east China's Shandong province, August 12, 2007. Heavy rain at the airport reached 50 cm, closing the airport until the water drained away.