Tag Archives: turboprop

The Kingfisher is Flying but not a Demo Yet

The introduction of the Kingfisher to Canadian Air Force service has been a bit drawn out and is not yet complete. This version of the Airbus C295 has some customization which has yet to be fully worked out. However, there are a number of the aircraft delivered including at Comox AFB on Vancouver Island. For the air show, there was one on the ramp and another was up and flying in the morning. It was not performing a demo, but it flew a lot of patterns before the show got underway. Therefore, I had my first exposure to a flying Kingfisher. They should be a more regular sight in the Pacific Northwest in due course.

Once More for the Sunset Avanti Shots

Leave a reply

A local Lynk Air Avanti coming into Paine Field might attract my interest, but I would probably skip it. However, if it is going to show up about ten minutes before sunset and the conditions are lovely, that is enough to tempt me out in the evening. (It doesn’t hurt that the journey time is really short at that time of day.) I got myself in position and waited for the arrival from the north.

I could just about make out the plane as it approached from over the sound, and it flew a quite tight base leg which meant it was clearly visible above the trees. Then the buzz became apparent as it lined up on final. I was being brave with shutter speeds since the Avanti deserves shots that make it look fast. A rapid burst of activity and it was down. It didn’t hang around on the ground too long continuing on its way about forty minutes later, but the light was done by then, so I headed home instead of waiting for it.

Crop Duster Conflicting Arrival

Leave a reply

The traffic at Eloy was mainly light aircraft on training flights or jump ships for the sky diving operation. As one of the Twin Otters was lining up to depart, we saw a crop-dusting aircraft approaching the field. He seemed intent on landing from the opposite direction to that which the Twotter was going to use. We wondered how this would play out but they clearly had done this before. The jump ship got swiftly airborne and then turned left and directly towards us. This gave it separation from the inbound plane which then landed quite happily on the now vacated runway. It also meant we got some different angles on the departing plane which was welcome.

Twotter Jump Ship

Leave a reply

One of the sky diving airfields in Arizona is at Eloy. A small field in a very small town, Eloy has a lot of customers for the jump ships and the vertical wind tunnel. During our trip, I had seen some Skyvans operating as jump ships, and I was quite looking forward to the chance to shoot some Skyvan ops from close range. When we got to Eloy, it turned out that things were different on the day. The Skyvans were nowhere to be seen. Instead, it was Twin Otters providing the lift and, once we were there, only one of them. However, there were a couple of locations around the field that gave us options to photograph the Twotter with it taking off to the north and recovering in a southerly direction. There was even one departure when it turned right over us but the reason for that will show up in a future post.

A Development Dash 8

Leave a reply

I may have a soft spot for testbeds, but development airframes are also something that will interest me. While driving around Tucson International Airport, we were looking at the various airframes at one of the schools based on the field. There was a Dash 8 sitting in the yard. It had Series 200 markings on it and seemed to be a development airframe. With Mark being a Canadian, he was definitely pleased to catch this but I was too. It looks in surprisingly good shape.

Photoship Over the Air Show

Leave a reply

The Abbotsford Air Show was also apparently an event that the Aviation Photocrew from Europe had made the trek for. They had arranged for a variety of photo flights associated with the show and involving some of the performers. I didn’t know that this had been set up but, when we saw the Skyvan flying overhead with planes formating on it, we knew what was happening and my friend Mark told me that the same folks were running things. I hope that they got some good shots.

A400M Atlas Demo from RIAT 2019

Leave a reply

I was working through some shots from my last trip to RIAT in 2019. Amazingly enough, I hadn’t finished editing some of the shots from that visit and I wanted to get rid of a lot of surplus shots to help the old hard drive space issues! As I was working through them, I got to some shots of the A400M displays I saw over the course of the weekend. I think the A400M is a cracking looking jet. Whether it is doing what everyone wanted of it, I have no idea. I just know it looks great and is capable of some really impressive demos.

For some reason, I had been feeling very brave during RIAT when it came to shooting some of the props. I had gone with quite low shutter speeds with long lenses and the results were not necessarily all I would have wanted. There were always going to be blurry shots to get culled, but the number of sharp ones was a little lower than I would have liked. However, all was not a total loss, and I did get a bunch of shots that I was happy with.

Here is a selection of shots from across the show including the official displays by the Airbus test crew and some of the operator aircraft too. The weather for RIAT 2019 was not that great. We did get some nice light occasionally but one of the days was very wet (and I was feeling crappy too) and the others were overcast a lot of the time. Not the most exciting light for a grey painted plane but they had the potential for prop vortices. Will I have big prints of these on the wall? No, I don’t think so. However, it was okay and there will be other times, I hope.

Not Many P-3s Left So This Was a Treat

Leave a reply

When my friend Paul first told me he was going to be in Seattle over the holidays, I thought we wouldn’t be able to get together. However, circumstances changed, and it turned out we could go out and check out the local aviation scene. We had been getting some stuff locally but a check on ADSB showed a P-3 and an EP-3 out at Whidbey Island and we debated whether to make the run north. In the end, we went for it. The EP-3 had been out a while already and it did return before we got there but we were not going to come up short. A P-3 made its return with some lovely December sun on it. It flew a bunch of patterns which meant the chance to try different spots to get some images, so we were rather pleased with the outcome.

Some of My Rides on Safari

Leave a reply

We took three internal flights while we were in Kenya and Tanzania and all three were interesting aircraft. Better still, they were all different types. One was a new one for me to fly on, but you might be surprised as to which that was. Our first trip was on a Let 410. It took us from the Serengeti to a short strip just short of the border with Kenya. This wasn’t my first ride in a 410 but it was my first landing. Previously I jumped out of one as part of a tandem skydive. This one had far more comfortable seating.

Once we crossed the border, we took another flight into the Maasai Mara. This was on a type that is ubiquitous in the area – the Cessna 208B Grand Caravan. I have never been on one of these. They were very densely configured and getting through the cabin to a seat was quite an effort. I don’t care to think what getting out in a hurry might be like! We saw so many of these with different operators over the course of our visit.

The last type we flew was a Dash 8 100 Series. A far larger type than the others, this flies some heavier routes, and these might involve multiple stops along the way picking up and dropping off customers. Ours picked us up in the Mara and took us direct to Nairobi. No intermediate stops for us. It has been a long time since I flew in an early generation Dash 8, and I hadn’t thought of them as doing rough field ops. However, supporting remote communities is part of their history so of course they are fine on these strips. Unfortunately, heavy rains at the strip 90 seconds from our camp meant we had to drive for forty minutes to another strip to make this flight. It was a good trip, though. This part of the world was great for people like me that like close up encounters with aviation!

The Marines Show Up

Leave a reply

I could easily have missed this, but my friend messaged me that a Herc was coming in. I was working on some other stuff and would have been unaware until too late. It was not where I was, and I wasn’t moving but the roll out and taxiing back was in lovely light so I wasn’t missing out. They taxied to the terminal and kept the engines running so I wondered if they were going straight back out but it wasn’t to be. They then taxied to a parking spot and shut down. Maybe they were clearing customs? Apparently they stayed for the night but were gone when I came by the following day.