Hi Dave an interesting post. Firstly the pictures are superb the early morning light; with sunshine, are great!! I have just started shooting in RAW also so I was interested to see your shots of aircraft. So far I've only taken the cats and birds in the garden; not at the same time lol. RAW is quite a learning curve especially when I'm not sure my shots were that good in Auto mode!! Good to hear about your 7D as I'm considering changing the 40D to this also. I have the Sigma DG 50-500mm 1:4.5-6.3 APO HSM attached to the 40D and I had wondered about the need maybe to change that as well. Anyhow your comments on the 7d and other reviews about what sounds an excellent camera have made my mind up.
John
Cheers John. Cats and birds in the same picture wouldn't quite be a good mix!
From memory you have a new Sigma 50-500mm with the Optical Stabilization? I think both old and new Bigma's will partner well with the 7D. If you do get a 7D, a new username will be needed!
Thanks for the info Dave-seems I will have to try and start saving for the 7D then-to be honest I had already decided to go for one,but it`s always interesting to hear other users comments;especially when they are using it for aircraft photos.
I still shoot in Jpeg as RAW seems very complex,and I don`t have the patience to use it. 
Since I've started photography in 2008, I used nothing but RAW and didn't see the need for it as I always seemed to get exposure ok at the time of photographing and was perfectly happy editing JPEG. I was determined not to shoot RAW as the file sizes are massive and didn't really fancy forking out for larger memory cards however last month I gave RAW a go during a trip to Manchester (Kingavo tagged along but was a bit too lazy to edit and post any of his pictures from that trip!
).
I've been editing pictures using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which is effectively just an add on to Photoshop, and I've been pleasently surprised. It's massively handy for fixing colour casts and the process isn't as bad or as long as I thought and the results are pretty favourable. It doesn't really take any more time now than editing a JPEG.
For example I'd flick through all the RAW files and click on one to open and edit it. It opens in ACR and from there you adjust the exposure and can add abit of sharpness and noise reduction, all at the same time, which only takes 10 seconds or so. When finished it opens into Photoshop as a Jpeg ready for editing. So really editing RAW isn't as long or complex as it's made out to be in reviews, etc.
Another thing handy about RAW is that it retains all the data from the picture even after editing the RAW file, so you can always return back to it's original form after performing an edit. Also it's very easy to adjust the exposure should you mess it up slightly at the time of photographing. And one last thing, it has video which could come in handy sometime.
Here's an example of a 7D image. It has had little editing and has only been reduced slightly in size from the original. (click on it and expand it up to full resolution)
So all in all, I can massively recommend the 7D, one of the best investments I've made in the photography world
