Equipment -- fairly standard semipro Nikon stuff -- nothing at all exotic. The Tigercat stuff is all digital D200 with 300 mm F4, the closeup with a 1.4x extender on the 300. I just went digital a year ago after almost 35 years of film. I've been doing this a very long time, (my first Nikon was an F with no meter that a friend of mine had gotten while on an alcohol soaked R&R in Hong Kong in the very early 70s and never learned how to use!).
Other than very careful technique and lots of experience, I rely on access and shooting a lot of images so as to have lots of choices for later use. Having a Press Pass at Reno, for instance, is wonderful -- unparallelled proximity to the machines and choice of dynamic angles.
A lot really is experience, though -- as shown by the shot of the Cat against the gray rather than blue background. We had a couple of days of truly crappy conditions at Reno last year --cold, overcast and windy. I got almost nothing that was very impressive for a day and a half. Finally we started to get some sun poking through the heavy crud. I waited til we had airlpanes in the sunny spots -- exposed for the sunlit airplane and let the sky do what it would. The result is a striking (to me at least) and unusual image.
One big advantage I have is that I learned my craft on all manual everything cameras that were really primitive by today's standards. This requires that one know what effect each setting change will have, and know the effects of changes of direction and quality of light , time of day, aperture vs depth of field, over or underexposure, etc. etc. Films were slow -- if you're going to shoot airplanes with ASA 25 Kodachrome, you'd better have good physical technique! We have a whole generation of pretty good photographers these days who really know very little about why their images work or don't work, because their incredibly capable digital toys do all the work, and don't require much thought to get an acceptable image. There's a difference between acceptable and exceptional.
Here's another crappy day shot...
