I like the one of the skytrain as it shows me the shape of the nose and the beautiful lines of the aircraft. Second one doesn’t work for me. The crop is neither here nor there. I think if you were going to crop the prop :) (See what I did there) I would have cropped tighter or taken a few steps back to get more of the fuselage in. Don’t know if it would have been possible but I think a shot of the cockpit would have been a great addition.
For the sake of background, the location was Farmingdale Airport, NY, on Memorial Day, with lots of visitors. The Thunderbolt was within the area where people could wander about, and so there was a lot of distracting “stuff” that I didn’t want in the picture. I would have liked to get closer in on the cockpit as you say, but I was restricted to ground level and couldn’t quite get enough of it clearly, so I settled for getting as much of a clutter-free view of the aircraft as I could. Unfortunately, that ruled out getting the whole thing. As it is, I’m not mad about the composition either (I never even noticed that I’d “cropped the prop” until you just said it. I bet I could have included it too) but I do like the detail and the plain background.
I was luckier with the Skytrain – it had just returned from a display flight and I snapped it just after its engines were shut down, and while it was still in an area inaccessible to visitors.