Category Archives: Pacific Northwest

Making the Victoria Approach

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I walked along the harbour shoreline in Victoria to go and see some of the floatplanes in operation.  The planes have to take off and “land” in the outer area of the harbour so they are a bit away from the easiest spots to watch things from when they are most active.  I saw a couple of planes making their approach.  They came in through the entrance to the harbour before making the turn to line up for landing.  A nice arc to final approach and then touching down to be at water taxi speed by the time the entered the restricted area of the harbour itself.  Fun to watch and I could have spent plenty of time there on a sunny afternoon!

Tacoma Glass Museum

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While the Chihuly Museum in Seattle is well known, it is not the only glass museum in the area nor the only one involving Dale.  He is from Tacoma originally and teamed up with some partners to create the Tacoma Glass Museum that is a focal point of the redevelopment of part of downtown Tacoma.  We had seen it on a previous visit and resolved to visit on a winter’s day.  We finally got around to doing that at last.  It is not a huge museum but it does have some interesting works.  It also has a hot shop which I shall post about separately.  These are some of the shots of the works that are on display.  Some of Dale’s own work is there but much work by other artists too.

Honeywell’s Convair is Back

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I have seen the Honeywell Convair at Paine Field parked up at various times but only once did I catch it flying in.  This post includes shots of it which were, unfortunately, on a rather overcast day.  A white airframe on a cloudy day is not a great target but its rarity meant I was still pleased to get it.  It was due back in at lunchtime recently so I decided to make the quick trip up while eating my lunch.  The weather had been crummy but I had seen some gaps developing in the clouds and Everett often is a little clearer than by the office.  I figured it might work out.

I got there a little while before it was due in and a clear patch did briefly appear before closing in as an Ameriflight Beech 1900 landed.  I looked to the distance and saw potential so waited with fingers crossed.  The Convair appeared downwind and then turned on to final.  It was a shady shape in a cloudy sky.  Had I blown it?  As the approach got close in, a burst of light appeared and the airframe jumped out from the background.  I was delighted.  It touched down, I packed my stuff up and I was back in the office before you knew it!

Lightroom 8.2 Detail Enhancer

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Updates to Lightroom come along relatively regularly and they tend to include new features along with fixes and performance tweaks.  The latest update, Lightroom 8.2, includes a new addition called Detail Enhancer.  This is a feature that is designed to provide some better small-scale detail as part of the raw conversion process.  It creates a new DNG file based on a more complex calculation of the demosaicing of the sensor data.

I saw some videos about it and figured it wasn’t going to be of much use for the type of thing I am working on.  However, it did trigger one possible area of interest.  The algorithms are supposed to be designed to make better calculations around the different color pixels that sensors have.  Sensors are set up in a Bayer Pattern where different color sensitive sensors occupy different pixel spaces.  They each record in one color and then software interpolates between them to create colors for each pixel irrespective of which color was originally recorded at that location.

In a post from a while back, I mused on the way in which the colors of the Southwest Livery and the registration clashed and seemed to provide a distorted image even when everything around them was sharp.  I was pondering whether this was artifacting caused by the different colors and the way the sensor was recording the data.  If this was the case, maybe this new functionality would change the way things were rendered.  I dug out a few of the shots that had previously demonstrated this effect and ran the process on them.  These shots show the wide shot, the original rendering of the close up and the revised rendering using Detail Enhancer.

As you can see from the comparisons, Detail Enhancer does not suddenly render a perfect registration for the aircraft.  However, to my eye at least, it does appear as if the results are noticeably better then they were with the original rendering.  For completeness, the original rendering is done with the latest process version of Adobe’s raw converter to make things as fair as possible.  It does appear to make a difference.  This makes me think my theory about whiny things looked wrong might have some merit, even if this update has not fully resolved things.

Fin Repaint

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I’m not sure why but recently the 747 fin in Future of Flight at Everett made it to be a popular photo on Airliners Net.  The fin sits inside the museum section and it was painted as a 747-8 fin, even though it actually came from a British Airways 747-100.  The picture had it with the -8 paint finish.  I have a similar shot but the fin has recently been repainted in a blue finish.  Not sure what the purpose was but, since Boeing have taken over Future of Flight, they must have had a reason.  If anyone knows why, let me know in the comments.

I Thought It Didn’t Snow Much in Seattle

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One of the things I thought I knew about the Seattle area was that it didn’t snow very much.  In our first winter here, we had one snowy day and it thawed very rapidly.  This winter has been a bit different.  We have had a couple of large storms come through.  The area is not well prepared for snow and the steep grades are not good when things get slippery.  Here are some shots from around our area during and after the snows.

Medusa Flight for the First Delivery

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Finally, the first Boeing KC-46 Pegasus tankers were delivered to the USAF.  Not one but two tankers were delivered in the ceremony, a nice effort at a joke by Boeing having left everyone thinking it would only be one.  Then again, when you have that many of them sitting around, I guess it should have been even more!  The ceremony took place on one day and the delivery was the following morning.

The jets left from Paine Field just after sunrise.  That is sunrise if you don’t have clouds on the horizon.  The sun had barely squeaked above those when the two jets took off as Medusa 1 and 2.  They were preceded by a McConnell AFB KC-135R – the aircraft that they will be replacing.  It got airborne in very limited light and headed for Kansas.  Then the two new jets lined up in turn and departed.  No flybys or wing waggles.  Just gear up, switch to departure frequency and off into the steadily brightening sky.  Avoid the traffic inbound to SeaTac and off you go.  Lots more should be following soon while efforts continue to fix the issues with the camera system and the underwing hose and drogue pods.

Closing the Viaduct and Opening the Tunnel

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For decades, the dominant feature of the Seattle waterfront has been the Alaskan Way Viaduct.  This carried Route 99 from the south side of the city along the waterfront before diving into the Battery Street Tunnel and then popping above ground to continue to the north.  It was a double deck viaduct with the northbound traffic on top and the southbound traffic on the lower level.  The viaduct suffered damage in the Nisqually Earthquake and further investigation showed just how vulnerable it was so the replacement process commenced.

The replacement is a tunnel.  Building the tunnel under the city was not an easy task.  A tunnel boring machine named Big Bertha was brought in to cut the tunnel.  Unfortunately, at some point it struck a hard object which damaged the main bearing for the cutting head.  A hole had to be dug and the machine extracted, repaired and reinserted.  This added years to the project but finally, in January 2019, the viaduct was closed.  A three-week period was set aside between closure of the viaduct and opening of the tunnel to allow reconfiguration of the approaches at each end.

On the weekend before the tunnel opened for traffic, WSDOT held celebrations.  A fun run took place on the Saturday and the Sunday included a bike ride.  This included riding both directions through the new tunnel as well as both directions on the old viaduct.  I signed up to take part.  Tons of cyclists also took the opportunity and the event was sold out well in advance.  The number of people mean things were pretty crowded and it could be congested at times.  The long descent in the opening tunnel section could have been quite fast but it wasn’t possible to speed along given how many people there were.

The new tunnel sections were nice and well let.  We actually rode quite a distance south after popping out near the Coast Guard base in the harbor and the wind was in our faces but that meant the run back was a lot easier.  The second part of the tunnel had to be a climb given the descent we had made originally but it wasn’t too bad.  Then we turned and were directed on to the streets to enter the Battery Street Tunnel.

This was a far more dismal experience.  It is a dark and dirty tunnel and I was pleased to get through it quickly.  We actually went through it the wrong way and we went south on the northbound part of the viaduct before diverting off and coming back on the lower level.  One last run through the dirty tunnel and we had completed the ride.  As I exited, plenty of riders were just starting.  It would have been possible to do it all again but I was happy to have done it and decided it was time to go home.  Later that day a serious (for Seattle) snow storm swept in so we had been lucky to get the ride done without any disruption.

Chihuly At Night

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This previous post included many shots from a visit to the Chihuly Museum in Seattle.  In that post I mentioned how it closed around the time it was getting dark and that a return trip during the winter would be in order.  With my mum visiting at Christmas, that’s exactly what we did.  We timed our visit to be later in the day so we would be there once the sun set.

The transition from light to dark brought a lot of options in the gardens.  Not everything was illuminated so some elements were okay while there was some light remaining but then were gone while others were only gently illuminated and only really showed the effects well once dark was fully upon us.  The view back to the museum was also interesting as it changed and I did go back inside often to see how the move from external to internal lighting affected the glass works on display in there.  Hopefully these shots give you a sense of how things look as darkness descends.