Tag Archives: airport

Big Tugs

At the majority of airports I fly out, there are basic tugs used to push the airliners back. They are hooked on using a towbar and push the jet out. The tugs at Heathrow are a bit different from the ones I am used to seeing. They are the type of tug that actually picks up the noseleg to move the aircraft out. The leg is surrounded by the tug and elevated. The tug then drives wherever required with the leg coming along. They are pretty substantial beasts. Moving a widebody needs a big tug I guess. They can move a 747 or an A380 but in this case “only” a 787.

Are These Globals Twins?

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Within the space of a few minutes, two Bombardier Global Expresses took off from Boeing Field. This type is a regular feature at BFI so this is not unusual. What did catch my eye was that they appeared to have the same color scheme. If they were NetJets aircraft, that would make sense. However, they didn’t look like a fleet operator I know (not that I know them all). Is this just a standard scheme that Bombardier will finish the jet in if you don’t have a preference or were they connected? If so, was a group of people taking two jets at the same time to go to the same place? Who knows?

A Pair of T-33s, How Nice

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A previous post talked about wanting to get the Boeing T-33s after having seen one of them flying over my office. I saw that two T-33s were actually operating out of St Louis. They appeared to be operating with the Catfish 757 testbed. A couple of days later I happened to see that the two jets were operating cross country, presumably en route back from St Louis to Seattle. Sure enough, that was what they were doing.

I was able to get to Boeing Field when they were completing the return journey. The tow jets were operating about ten minutes apart. The weather wasn’t great, unfortunately. There had been some nice sun a little earlier but, by the time they arrived, the clouds had rolled in. Even so, it was good to catch both jets. One of them was operating solo but the other had someone in the backseat who seemed to spot me and watched me most of the way down the approach.

A Change of Location Makes for Locals That Are of Interest

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I made a stop at Vancouver International on my way to the city for a few days. It was the end of the day when I got there and I met up with my friend Mark who gave me a few pointers of what to look out for. The arrivals were in the opposite direction to that we had expected which messed up things a little but there were still options. Besides, I hadn’t shot there before so I was keen to see what was going on.

When you live near an airport, you can get blasé about what comes and goes. The same things every day can be a bit dull. For someone who has never been there before, though, all of this stuff is new and interesting. WestJet may be a familiar sight in Canada but I don’t see them very often. Dash 8s may be very old hat but they have largely vanished where, replaced by the Q400 derivative, so I am pleased to see them. It is this variety that makes somewhere new so interesting. These shots are some of the items that sparked my interest that day. Some more specific planes will get their own time on the blog in due course.

Raptor Turning Overhead

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The F-22 Raptor that displayed at Seafair took off from Boeing Field away from us. It kept things nice and low building up speed before pulling hard to the vertical. Impressive but a long way away from us. Unfortunately, the pilot then elected to land on the opposite runway. All of this was away from us. The only upside was that, when he ran in to break, he ended up breaking right over the top of us. A brief window to get some shots and rather close in for the longer lens I was using but, all things considered, it was a good consolation prize.

Billy Bishop Airport

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Over 20 years ago we took a trip to Toronto. While we were up the CN Tower, I took a photo of Toronto City Centre Airport, located on the island just offshore from the city. It wasn’t a busy looking airport at that time. Since then, things have moved on a bit. Now it is a busy hub for Porter Airlines, flying their Bombardier Q400s across Canada and into the US. (Depending on a planning approval, they may add C Series jets to this location.)

I recently had to fly from Toronto to Chicago and, with Midway as the better airport for me, Billy Bishop Airport as it is known, provided the better option. A tunnel has been built between the land and the airport which means you don’t need to take a ferry anymore. It is a compact airport but pretty neat. The tunnel provides good access and, as you come up from there on the escalators, you get some displays of the aircraft Billy Bishop flew. There is also a statue of him on the land side of the tunnel. If you get to fly through there, it is definitely a fun place to transit through as it is far smaller than the average city airport.

Easy to Guess Who You Work For

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At was at BFI awaiting the arrival of something and I was checking FlightRadar24 to see what was coming in. I saw a Learjet 60 on the screen south of SeaTac and tapped on it. As soon as I saw the flight path, it was clear who the jet belonged to. The shot below was what I saw and the repeated patterns around SeaTac suggested it was an FAA aircraft undertaking calibration flights for the airport instrumentation.

I stopped thinking about it for a while until I saw a jet appear on the approach to BFI that I hadn’t been aware of. Sure enough, it was the FAA Lear 60. They plonked it down right on the keys and quickly exited to the FBO. I imagine that flying repeated sequences of approaches is not the most exciting way to spend the day so they were glad of the break.

787 Development Jets

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Two versions of the Boeing 787 have been in service for a while. However, development activities continue. The 787-10 is still undergoing flight test but work also continues on the older jets. Some of this is also related to the Dash 10. I had a post on my first encounter with the 787-10 which I wrote about here. I have since come across another of the test aircraft. This one is plain white and doesn’t benefit from the nice house colors that Boeing has.

Meanwhile, one of the 787-8 test aircraft has recently been testing the newest version of the Rolls Royce Trent 1000. I saw this engine when it was being tested on Rolls’ testbed in Tucson and that was in this post. Now it has been fitted to its intended platform and is undergoing trials. These have included lengthy flights around the US including one in which they traced out the planform of the aircraft across multiple states. If you are going to go flying for 18 hours, you might as well find a way to have fun with it. The aircraft is carrying the same logo on the engine nacelle that was on the testbed. Hopefully, the delayed upgraded engine will soon be in service, not just on the Dash 10 but also on the other variants.

PG&E Heli Lift Training

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I miss the amount of helicopter shooting I used to do. Every once in a while I come across a help in action and I feel like it is a little victory. One time it was the local sheriff’s department practicing line work and that showed up here. On this occasion, I was coming away from an interview I had done for a GAR feature. I was at Yolo County airport in California. As I drove down the road, an MD500 was hovering over the field next to the road.

I pulled off a short distance away to see what was going on. PG&E is a local power company and they appeared to be running a training program for they power line teams. They were hooking up transmission components and moving them a short distance to another team that then unhooked them. This process continued as they moved items from place to place giving the ground teams practice with the various items.

There was a strong breeze and a bit of gustiness so the pilot was working quite hard but, since everything was at ground level, I suspect it was a lot easier than if this was at the top of a pylon. He wasn’t the one getting the training, though, by the look of it. I watched for a while and from a couple of different angles and then left them to it. I hope the class was successful.

Building But Not Delivering – The KC-46 Story

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The tale of the USAF’s quest for a new refueling tanker has been long and drawn out. People went to jail, awards were made and overturned. None of that matters now. The contract is with Boeing to produce a variant of the 767 as the KC-46 Pegasus. The program has not been smooth. Technical and production issues have caused delays. The in service date has slipped and Boeing has incurred a lot of overruns.

While all of this has been going on, the production process has not stopped. Consequently, while testing still continues, there are production airframes coming off the line. If you go to Boeing Field, there are a bunch of test airframes on the flight line. If you go to Paine Field, there are a bunch more that remain to be finished. It appears that Boeing is building the airframes, sealing them up, not fitting high value items like engines, and parking them wherever there is space. A few years ago, Paine Field was covered in undelivered 787s. Now it is as if time has turned back because the Dreamliner’s predecessor is the type parked all over the place.