Tag Archives: pain field

An Antonov Departs in the Murk

The IL-76 departure was not the only Volga Dnepr jet heading out that morning.  An AN124 was also in and they scheduled their departures within 30 minutes of each other.  I wasn’t passing the Ruslan up given that I was already there.  The weather was still crummy but this did mean that there was a lot of moisture showing up as the pressure dropped.  The 124 was loaded up a bit more so ran a lot longer on the takeoff run and rotated not far from where I was.  The moisture in the air resulted in some nice puffs over the wing surface and it was trailing vortices from rotation all through the climb out until it disappeared into the clouds.  It actually was pulling its own cloud for a while as it neared the cloud base and I thought it had gone into the cloud at first but it cleared up again for a moment before it did finally enter the clouds.

Off to Warsaw

If you buy a car, you go to the dealer to pick it up.  If you buy an airliner, there might not be a dealer but you will still go to pick it up.  After the production test flights have been completed, the customer gets to carry out their own test flights.  If all squawks have been dealt with, time to pay and take the “keys”.  Then a crew from the airline will fly the plane to their home base.  This 787 had been handed over to LOT and the crew were flying it back to Warsaw.  Delivery flights are often obvious from the takeoff roll.  Fueled up for a long trip, they use a bit more of the runway than the test flights do.  In a short while, this jet will be busy plying the LOT route structure.