During the Parade of Ships for San Francisco Fleet Week, the first warship was led by a fireboat from the City. It sprayed water from its hoses to provide a focal point to the parade. As it got closer to us, the angle of the light and the mist from the fire hoses resulted in a clear rainbow forming in front of the fireboat. It looked pretty cool and I am not sure the photos really do it justice. However, here is a shot to show you pretty much what we saw.
Not long ago I complained about the dirty condition of a China Eastern A330. At the time, I thought it might be a non-standard jet because the livery was basically white with a couple of distinguishing marks. It turns out that I hadn’t appreciated that China Eastern have replaced their previous colors with a new and less colorful scheme. Since then I have seen some 777s come in with the new scheme. In an era of relatively bland airline colors, it seems to me that China Eastern have gone a stage further and taken any interest at all from the livery. Not a cool effort on their part I think. They should check out what China Southern is doing by comparison.
The repetitive nature of the same airlines and the same types is what you expect of airports these days. Every once in a while, though, the airlines put some extra decoration on their aircraft. Usually you can see that there is something there before you get to see what it actually says. JetBlue have an Airbus A321 that is apparently their 200th aircraft. It has a big decal on the rear fuselage to highlight this fact. It apparently joined them over a year ago so a bit late for congratulations.
While the world’s 747 fleet is progressively running down, United is still a big operator of the type and SFO is a focus of their operations of the type. Consequently, during the surge of departures to Asia in late morning, you will have a pretty steady stream of Jumbos taxiing out and taking off. While Roger and I were out, a couple of them taxied out at the same time. We had one holding short of 28L and the other was in the gap between 28L and 28R as incoming aircraft approached. I joked with Roger that the two of them should line up on parallel runways and depart in formation.
When the inbound jets had landed, both aircraft moved forward again and, sure enough, they lined up on both runways. We couldn’t help but laugh at this since they seemed to be following our instructions. You will regularly see parallel departures on the 01 runways but we couldn’t believe that we would have the same thing here. Sadly, we were right. The closer jet departed first and was then followed a short while later by the second. It would have been very cool to see them climb out side by side but that was a bit too much to ask.
Depending on which way you depart out of Oakland, what time of day it is and what side of the plane I am on, I get a variety of things that I can get a shot of. On this day I got to see downtown Oakland and the light on the city was pretty nice. The view across to Lake Merritt and the heart of downtown (including the building I work in) was pretty good. Here is a quick sample of what I saw that day including the run across the bay towards Treasure Island.
SFO controllers are known to make some late runway changes for the arriving aircraft. The two runways are very close together to the sidestep maneuver required is not too drastic but it is still not necessarily something the crews want to deal with. A Southwest 737 was on approach and passing near us on the shore when it apparently got the change instructions. We got a sudden topside view as it turned towards us followed by a reversal of bank as it straightened up on the new runway. Compared to the average arrival, this was quite a bit of excitement! Also, if you look closely, you can see another Southwest jet in the background that had just departed.
I nearly got myself late for an arrival when waiting for a Korean 747-8 a while back as I mentioned in this post. I thought at the time that it was silly to focus on the Korean jet since it would be showing up on a regular basis. Sure enough, I have seen them again since. This one I got at Coyote Point with some nice early morning light. The low light angle meant the underside of the jet got a lot of light and the plane seemed to glow to me as I was shooting it. A nice way to get this type again.
One element of shooting at Coyote Point that I particularly like is the way you can get a good view of the undersides of the jets as they come in. The long haul flights often have an added feature. The wing fuel is mostly burnt down by the time they land but there are reserves still in the tanks to cover unforeseen events. Many hours at altitude has chilled the fuel down nicely so, as the plane descends into the moist air over the bay, a nice frost forms on the underside of the wings where the fuel is still sitting.
I have seen this on various jets over the years so this post is a compilation. Some of these shots are recent and some are from older shoots. Rather than show the whole plane, these are focused on the areas where the frost forms. They give you a good idea of the internal structure of the various types involved.
Early morning is not usually a good time to shoot anything at SFO. The sun is behind the planes as they come in so you don’t get a particularly appealing light angle. However, the middle of winter means the sun rises a long way south so, while it still starts out a bit behind things, it quickly moves to an angle that starts to work well. The planes end up with good lighting as they pass and the light on them as they head away can be very conducive to nice shots.
I was continuing my program of testing the 100-400 post the repairs it received at Canon. Coyote Point was a good place to start the day since it has better possibilities this early and it also allows for shooting down the approach path as the planes head to the runway. I also wanted to have a further go at multiple exposures to stack the images of the planes to make a composite of their flightpath. The early morning is also good because the relative humidity levels are up and the planes can trail some nice vortices.
As the light angle comes around, it is still quite low in the sky. The result is some nice lighting on the underside of the airframe – something that is not normally something that you get. Rather than the warm glow you get with a setting sun, the light seemed a lot crisper and cleaner and I really liked the way the planes looked.
The parallel approaches at SFO are well enough known. I have blogged about them myself here and here. Getting two planes in the same shot is a cool result but it isn’t often that you get three and all of them from the same airline. I was out with Hayman and Roger when a pair of jets came down the approach almost perfectly together. We all got shots of them as they came in. I didn’t notice anything further until I was looking through the shots back at home. Apparently, a United jet was departing prior to the arrival of this pair and it happened to fly out on a path that aligned with my view of the pair. Three jets in one shot!
