Hey Doug, these shots are great !
I'll try to make some comments. I understand your frustration with shot #2. Indeed, the glassy water gets all white because of the sun reflection, which makes quite a blank background, right ?
One solution could have been to:
1 - Bring the camera MUCH closer to the plane. Same angle of view, but closer. Don't fear about showing an "incomplete" airplane in the picture. If the angle of view is right, then its perfectly fine to show just a part of the plane (like, forward half, stuff like that). Also, since the background is water only, don't be afraid to use the zoom. You can zoom on the water without fearing about blurries, take advantage of this !
2 - Change the orientation of your plane, but just a bit. The goal would be to show, in the background, the "edge" of the sun reflection in the water. The sun reflection, here, is a big white stain on the sea surface, right ? If you aim your camera just a bit aside, then instead of seeing only this white stain, you'll see just part of it, but also a part of a more colorful water, like what we can see at the bottom of the plane. Of course, you'll have to maintain this excellent "top-down" view of your plane, which gives a great feeling.
The combination of these two points shoud give some interesting results.
For the rest of the comments, you chose a very nice plane. I love the "baked textures" technique used by a few (too few) plane creators. It gives a nice "consistency" to the materials, the plane looks less cartoonish. Your view angles are nice as well, but you should make a bit more variation in the camera distance. Also, one of your shots, the third one exactely, doesn't have such a nice background. The view angle is cool, but there's not much to see behind the plane. Last remark: the last two shots are a bit too similar, you should have picked only one of them
