[dbatten]

I remember this showing up in the SO sidebar a long time ago (what a time-suck that thing is). At the time, I remember thinking that some of these people must be trolling - and I still do.

For example, the people arguing that the wheels have already touched down. It seems abundantly obvious to me that the wheels have NOT touched down, and that the small strip of black asphalt running parallel to the wheels is a taxi-way in the background which has lots of small aircraft sitting on it. I get the uneasy feeling that anybody that sees it any differently is just trying to gaslight me. But, then, that was also the feeling I got about the blue dress, and that turned out to be all too genuine... People genuinely saw it differently, they weren't trolling.

To me, the lack of heat blur behind the engines seems to be reasonably conclusive evidence that it's landing... But who knows.

[jessriedel]

Based on the later-discovered extra photos, it appears that the taxi-way in the background (which, as you say, is clearly much further from the camera than the landing plane due to the tiny small aircraft parked along it) is nearly perfectly overlapping with the actual runway, so that at the moment of touchdown the wheels look like they are touching both the runway and the background taxi-way. The larger blacktop with yellow lines in the foreground of the picture is a second taxi-way (closer to the camera than the runway, and clearly offset from it visually). This in particular can be seen by the fourth photo in the time series, the one taken immediately after the OP photo.

The quirky features of OP photo are such a nerd snipe, and the later finding the complete photo series is just so convenient, that I'm tempted to think the whole Stack Exchange post was planned.

[shawabawa3]

The full set of photos was found - it was landing

https://i.stack.imgur.com/QTrv2.jpg

The taxi-way is the foreground - the wheels do indeed seem like they have touched down or are millimetres away

[mannykannot]

As one person pointed out on the site, the shadow of the airplane can just be made out on the actual runway, while it is clearly missing from the ramp / taxiway in the foreground.

The wheels are, in fact, off the ground, but only just, as revealed by the smoke in the next image of the sequence.

I, too, was convinced by the absense of heat blur.

[malexw]

> I remember this showing up in the SO sidebar a long time ago (what a time-suck that thing is).

I ended up installing this Chrome extension to block the "Hot Network Questions" parts of Stack Exchange because I found that I was getting distracted by them too often.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stack-block/oaimjd...

[Farbklex]

You can now disable "Hot network questions" in the site's settings.

Had to do this as well because they were just too distracting.

[miahi]

The strip in the foreground seems to be taxiway B[1], and not the runway (taxiways have yellow short lines, runways white long lines)

[1] https://skyvector.com/files/tpp/2014/pdf/00384AD.PDF

[oconnor663]

Did you see the extra photos at https://i.stack.imgur.com/QTrv2.jpg ? That might help with the wheels question.