Category Archives: photo

Finally, an Antonov Antonov

There have been quite a few appearances of Antonov AN124s on this blog. They all have something in common. They were operated by Volga Dnepr. There is another operator that I have not had much success seeing. That is Antonov Design Bureau. They never seem to be operating near to me. That was why I was so pleased when one was scheduled in to Everett. I was taking a week off work anyway so no reason not to go.

The weather wasn’t great but how many chances would I get for an ADB AN124? A genuine Antonov Antonov. Time to go. They were arriving from the north and it was morning so the only option was Future of Flight which wouldn’t normally be good for a morning flight. However, with a grotty overcast, sun on the wrong side wasn’t going to be such a problem.

There was a bit of a breeze from our side of the runway so the early approach looked like they were coming straight for us. They floated down the approach and touchdown of all of those wheels resulted in plenty of smoke. Then they taxied back to the Boeing ramp (after some confusion with air traffic) and shut down.

Tranquility By the Shore

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The walk along the beach in Deception Pass State Park starts out in amongst a lot of people. The West Beach near the parking lot had a lot of people enjoying themselves while we were there. However, they didn’t want to go too far it seemed as, when we started walking along the shoreline towards the North Beach, we rapidly found ourselves a lot more isolated. There was the occasional person passing the other way but we were, for the most part, on our own. Standing on the shore and looking out across the water on a sunny afternoon was really relaxing.

P-3s Coming Out of the Sun

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When Ault Field is operating on 25, the aircraft taxi out to the departure end along a taxiway that gradually brings them into view from the crash gate. The sound will usually precede them and, in the case of the P-3s, that is a pretty distinctive sound. As the day wears on, they are coming at you out of the sun so a bit more silhouetted but that helps to make them look more interesting. They pull around to the hold point, sometimes mixing in with the Growlers before departing off to the west. This is a sight that will soon be gone as the P-8s take over.

Turbulence in the Channel

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When the bridge was built over Deception Pass, it provided a reliable method of crossing off Whidbey Island. Prior to the bridge, a boat was needed. I was there on a rough day – the weather was lovely – but the current running through the pass was pretty impressive. Watching the boats fight it made the flow very apparent. Closer to the shore, the current would churn up the water to create standing waves a short distance away from the beach. It looked like the sort of thing that could easily overwhelm a smaller craft if you didn’t know exactly what you were doing.

What Goes On These Pylons?

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An older generation of Learjet was heading out from Boeing Field. I almost ignored it but I got a few shots as it rotated and climbed out. As it did so I noticed it had a pod on an underwing pylon. A little further research shows it belongs to Phoenix Air. Apparently, they have a few Learjets that have electronic gear fitted – sometimes on pylons and sometimes internally. This pod appears to have dielectric elements front and rear so may well be an EW pod of some sort. I wonder if anyone knows more about these guys and what they would be up to.

That Sinking Feeling

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I don’t go to airports to photograph boats. That would seem to be a bit of a poor choice but, in Renton’s case, you are right by the water and there are some boats. Still, that wasn’t the goal until I saw this sad sight. I am not sure of the story behind this but obviously something didn’t go right. Did it sink here for some reason or had it developed a problem and made it back to the dock before it was overcome? I don’t know. All I do know is that it looks like an expensive fix is required.

Finally a VLJ Makes It

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About a decade ago, the very light jet was the hot idea. Everyone seemed to have a design and they were bringing tons of investment in to make the planes and sell them in quantities and at prices that had previously been unthinkable. As it turned out, there was a good reason why it had been unthinkable and the projects either never made it to production or made a few before bankruptcy followed (sometimes more than once). Eclipse did better than most in making jets before they folded, later re-emerging in a slimmed down form.

Cirrus is one company that stuck with it and didn’t go bust. It did benefit from a lot of Chinese investment and the fact it had a successful piston lineup to generate some income didn’t hurt. Their approach was the SF50 Vision, a single engine jet. It was a slightly unusual design but not a bad one and it has finally made it to certification and production. This example is a regular at Boeing Field so maybe it lives there?

Blending to Remove Traffic

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During a previous visit to Vancouver, I experimented to blending images of the same scene to remove objects I didn’t want included. When photographing the bridge at Deception Pass, I decided to have another go at this. The bridge was very interesting but I found the traffic on the bridge to be a distraction. Looking at some of the shots afterwards, it wasn’t as bad as I thought at the time but, even so, I decided to try processing the shots.

This was the same approach as before. Load all of the images into Photoshop using the Statistics function and use Median to average things out and hopefully remove the items that I didn’t want to appear. It seemed to work pretty well. The top shot has the output while the one below is one of the input shots cropped in along with the final result to show what was removed.

DoJ SAAB

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Unmarked aircraft are conspicuous by their effort to be inconspicuous. I saw this SAAB 2000 parked up at the Clay Lacy ramp and, before too long, it taxied out and departed kindly backtracking passed me in the process. SAAB 2000s are not overly common anyway so that was the first thing to notice but, since it was completely white, I figured it might belong to someone not advertising their presence. Sure enough, it belongs to the Department of Justice. I wonder what it was doing here?

Deer That Don’t Care

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Fort Casey had a bunch of deer that were chomping their way around the grounds while I was there. These deer seemed pretty fearless. I guess there are tons of people coming through the Fort, most of whom will not be any trouble to the deer so they must get pretty used to people in close proximity and know that they are not in any threat. Consequently, I found that my efforts at getting a photo were pretty straightforward. If I tried to get too close, I figured that they would move off but I could be close enough without affecting them.

The one creature that did seem to spook one of the deer was a cat. Sitting up against a wall was a ginger cat that was sunning itself. It didn’t seem to be interested in doing anything at all but the deer was aware of it and seemed to be quite nervous. A number of times it would jump, presumably because the cat had twitched in some way. It seemed pretty clear that it was not moving for anyone though. I guess the deer is going to have to get used to it.