Full Deflection

It'd be a great photo if only the background were more dramatic... stupid weather!

Overall it's a bit flat; the lighting just wasn't very dramatic. I'd see if there is any way to increase the contrast and "pump up" the colors on the plane; try to make it stand out from the gray background as much as possible. Maybe a bit of "dehazing" USM would help. A bit tighter cropping would probably help, too. There's a lot of empty gray around the plane.

"Dehazing" is a local contrast enhancement technique. You use the normal unsharp-mask filter, but with a large radius (20-60 pixels, depending on the resolution of the image) and a very small amount (perhaps 5-20%) and a threshold of 0. This contrasts with the typical USM sharpening parameters: radius 1-2 pixels, amount 100-150%, and threshold of 10. What it does is enhance local contrast, where "local" is approximately the radius you've choosen. I use it for two things, one is removing haze from the distance in landscapes, the other is for ading some "pop" to photos of shiny things with sharp-edges and pinpoint highlights (cars, planes, etc.).

It's a widely used technique, but for the life of me, I can't seem to find a good reference that describes it. Here's a link to a nature forum with some examples (see post #3): http://www.dcresource.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30930