Tag Archives: Boeing

Visualise That Trailing Vortex

I was working through some images that I had taken on my one and only visit to Rainbow Canyon when the military was still flying through that part of region. One of the shots that caught my eye was this one of a Super Hornet. It had passed me and was heading down towards the valley. This involved a few tight pulls around the curves in the canyon. A strong trailing vortex changes the density of the air which affects the refractive index. This distortion of the light makes the vortex visible if only by impacting the view of whatever is behind it. A good view of that effect can be seen in this shot.

Gear and Flaps

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Photographing at Heathrow means you get a steady stream of planes with barely a minute passing without another one landing. You can end up with a ton of similar shots. That got me thinking about other things I would like. A close up of the undercarriage and perhaps the flap system came to mind. For some reason – possibly the noise that the bursting vortices made after they landed – I decided that the 777-300ERs would be the ones I tried these shots with. However, an A380 did sneak in.

There is something about the mass of machinery that you get around the main landing gear and the inboard flaps that seems so complex. Of course, this is all under the wing so the lighting is less than ideal, but you get what you can. Just before sunset would be perfect but you don’t get to choose when the jets land. Here are a few of my favourite shots from that part of the afternoon shoot.

Virgin Atlantic Names of Planes

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Since they first started flying, Virgin Atlantic has been naming their planes with slightly quirky titles. Many airlines have names on their planes, but they are more often something like cities, rivers, castles etc. Features of the country that the airline is based in. Virgin has a different approach, and they do like a good amount of pun activity in their names. This can also be reflected in the registration of the aircraft with the letter combination sometimes tied to the name.

I have seen this naming over the years and never really given it much thought. However, on a visit to Heathrow a while back that was aiming for something specific, I naturally got to see a bunch of Virgin jets arriving. I decided to get a few close-up shots of the names at the front and then decided to check out what other names I had come across. This is not a comprehensive list of the different planes, nor do I plan on making it a goal to get them all, but it is a fun look at some of the names that they have gone with.

Looking Back on Bones at Nellis

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I was digging through the catalogue recently. Every once in a while, I will just randomly move the slider in grid view and see what pops up. Having been taking images for a long time, there are often things that I have completely forgotten about that show up in the collection. While doing this, I came across some shots of B-1Bs launching out of Nellis when I was between the runways for a Red Flag media day. I hadn’t really done much with these images. They were a touched underexposed and I had not processed most of them.

I ended up working through a few of them as they reminded me of the amazing experience being alongside a runway when four F101 engines in full burner come by. It really does get your attention. The B-1 fleet has been shrinking in recent years, and the plan is that the remaining airframes will be retired when the B-21 fleet comes online. It won’t be too long before this sight is confined to history.

United Eco Liveries

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While I was shooting from a distance, I did get a shot of a United 767 heading into Heathrow. This jet is painted in the sustainable aviation fuel livery. I reminded me of a 737 I had seen from them in an Eco livery. Add to that there is the Max 10 that was involved in the fuel trials with NASA and I have a few of the United special liveries. Here are those planes.

Thinking Back to LAX and Old Favourites

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I’m not sure what it was that got me to these pictures. I was working on something other project and then found myself looking at some shots from a visit to LAX a long time ago. Two planes jumped out at me from that day. One was a Lufthansa A340-300 and the other was a British Airways 747-400. Both were taking off later in the day and the light was very nice. I decided both deserved a re-edit.

The backgrounds for both jets were a little busy and so I decided to try something similar to my processing for airborne shots but that I hadn’t done much on the ground. I used the smart masking tools to select the aircraft. Then I inverted the mask to select the background. This allowed me to take the lighting down for the background and also make things a little cooler with the white balance. Then I could warm up the plane a little more and brighten it up. This helps to separate the aircraft from the background and make it more the focus of the shots.

The BA fleet of 747s are long gone now and passenger 747s are definitely a rarity. The Lufthansa A340s are still operating but only because of the delays to new aircraft deliveries. It won’t be too long before they are heading to the desert. This will be a nice reminder of the fun stuff I used to be able to photograph.

I Guess It Is Farewell for UPS MD-11s

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The crash of the UPS MD-11 when one of the engines separated at rotation resulted in a grounding of the entire fleet of DC-10s and MD-11s. The process for returning the fleets to service continues as I write this, but I recently heard that UPS has decided that they won’t bother to return their fleet and will accelerate a retirement process that was already being planned.

Since Boeing Field was somewhere I got to spend a lot of time and was a location that got regular visits from UPS MD-11s, I got to see them on a regular basis. I left before they did but now no one there will get to see this beefy jet in UPS colours again. Here are some of the shots I have got of them over the years. I do hope that other operators will still have a need for their examples and this won’t be the end of the road for this type.

Flow Viz on a Hornet

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A long time ago (but not in a galaxy far, far away), I had a visit to the naval air station at Fallon. The weather was not ideal for the visit, and we had a bit of a disappointing result when it came to flying jets. I did spend some time on the ramp, though. A Super Hornet was marked up in squadron colours, and this was what initially caught my attention. However, as I looked at the jet more closely, I was fascinated by the dirt streaks emanating from the fasteners on the rear fuselage panels. These marks clearly showed the path the flow takes across this part of the airframe.

Qatar’s Apaches Look Better Than Everyone Else’s

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The Apache is a mean looking helicopter with plenty of angles and bumps to make it an interesting photo subject. However, the one shortcoming is that it is usually painted a dark green colour and that really sucks in the light. Getting a great shot of it is surprisingly difficult. Qatar, on the other hand, has done a nice job of coming up with a desert camouflage scheme for their Apaches. It really stands out against the usual dark schemes. It looked great in the sun when it arrived at RIAT. On an overcast day, even it struggled in the static display, though.

Not Sure the Laminar Flow is Surviving

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If you look at the most recent Boeing aircraft, they have adopted a far deeper inlet lip design. I don’t know whether it is connected but they have been doing work on having laminar flow around the engine cowlings. When the 787 first came along, airlines were not allowed to have them painted anything other than white. That has since been relaxed but there was a performance benefit to the design that was needed to meet promised goals. Consequently, I imagine that this area is quite sensitive to disturbance. That makes this Qantas 787-9 stand out to me. There was a load of patching on the inlet when I saw it taking off from Heathrow heading to Perth. That is a very long flight and tests the performance of the Dreamliner in its nominal configuration. I guess the impact can’t be that bad.