Category Archives: Pacific Northwest

Ruslan Before Sunset

My wife is a trooper. We were coming back from a day out in the mountains and I saw an Antonov AN124 was coming in to Everett. It was due to land shortly before sunset and sounded like something I wouldn’t want to miss. We weren’t going to be able to get home in time to drop of Nancy so I could get back up to see it arrive. She agreed to make a diversion to see the plane come in. Not her thing but she was okay with being there.

The timing could not have been much better. The light was nice, low and soft so the plane looked great as it trundled down the approach. When it taxied back up to the north entrance to the Boeing ramp, the texture of the skin, which is normally lost in higher light, was a lot easier to see. In fact, the finish looked pretty rough. I guess the Volga Dnepr planes get a lot of use!

Tumwater Canyon

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Our trip across Stevens Pass ended just short of Leavenworth. We took a run along the river through Tumwater Canyon. Here the river sits in the bottom of the valley and the road runs alongside it. Plenty of nice views of the river as it winds its way downhill, some of which you can only see as you drive along the road because there is no space to stop. Other locations, though, do provide an area to allow you to pull off and wander around. Given how pretty it is, you are not alone in these places!

The river widens out in places and then narrows in to some rapids in others. On a sunny day with the fall foliage around, standing by the water and watching the swirling and tumbling flows is really relaxing. The noise of the water can drown out the traffic passing not far away and you can be quite mesmerized. If you don’t mind the close proximity to the traffic, you can also explore a little in each direction away from the parking and get some great new views of the river. You are either walking alongside the road or outside the barriers and close to the edge of the river so paying attention is a must!

One downside to the popularity of the place is that it is a bit tricky to avoid having lots of people in your shots. You can move away a little and have them out of sight. Alternatively, a little careful selection of your angles and shooting location and they can either be cropped out or cunningly concealed behind some other part of the scenery.

What Am I Supposed to do With This F-16 Ladder?

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The Open House at Portland International that the Redhawks held was not the only thing going on that morning. While we were checking out the F-15s, a bunch of ground crew were at work out on the ramp area. They were setting up spots on the ramp for some incoming planes. As soon as I saw the ladders being carried, I could see that they were not for F-15s. They looked a lot more like F-16 ladders. The crews carried them out in a variety of manners but this person seemed to have a more relaxed way of moving a ladder around.

Ah, An Esprit!

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Since I didn’t grow up in the US, a lot of the older cars in museums are not ones that I knew about as a kid. However, a Lotus Esprit is one right out of my childhood. I fell in love with this car as a result of The Spy Who Loved Me when Bond’s Esprit morphed into a submarine. From then on, I dreamed of owning this car. The America’s Car Museum has an example of the pre-turbo Esprit in its collection and, while it certainly is dated by the styling, I still think it is a great looking car. Just don’t pay attention to the switches and knobs pinched from the parts bins of the major car manufacturers of the time!

Iron Goat Caboose

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The old path of the railroad across Stevens Pass has been abandoned and replaced by a new route that is lower down and has tunneled through sections of the mountains to avoid the tricky climb that was previously required. This abandoned right of way has been turned into a trail called the Iron Goat Trail. Since it is a railroad trackbed, it is not a steep trail which means that a substantial portion of it is actually wheelchair accessible!

Our day out did not include time for hiking but the trail looks well worth exploring and, come the spring, we shall be making a specific trip to go hiking. We did stop at the parking lot to read the signs about the history of the pass. Also, an old caboose is kept at the entrance to the trail and I figured it deserved a shot!

Hello C-17s. Where Are Your Buddies?

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In this previous post, I mentioned the crews at Portland setting up for the arrival of some F-16s. They were coming in from Texas for a week of DACT training according to the word around the ramp. Sadly, the jets did not arrive prior to the end of the Open House. However, they weren’t the only planes coming in. The ground crews and support equipment arrived ahead of the jets courtesy of a pair of C-17s. These arrived a few minutes apart and taxied in to the adjacent section of the ramp. One jet was already unloading as the second taxied in. They were a nice compensation for the F-16s not arriving in time.

Sabreliner Testbed

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The Sabreliner is a neat little jet under normal circumstances, combining as it does the wing of the Sabre with a fuselage for passengers. This example, that now lives in the Evergreen Aerospace Museum in McMinnville Oregon, is even better because it is a testbed. The nose has a new radome grafted into place to allow the testing of different radar. Meanwhile, pods can be mounted under the wings to test a variety of different sensors and electronics. Some of these different configurations are displayed alongside the airframe. Good to know that after years of specialized service, the aircraft will survive in the indoor comfort of the museum.

Lake Union Departures

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The floatplane activity on Lake Union is fun to check out, not just for an aviation geek like me, but for plenty of visitors to the city too. I have previously gone down to the lakeshore to check them out but, one evening, while driving into the city to drop a friend off, I was coming down the road on the hill overlooking the lake when a plane took off giving an interesting alternative perspective on its departure. I figured this needed to be explored further.

The question was where to go. The road I had been on was not one on which stopping was practical. Parallel roads exist but there are buildings along most of them so the view is obscured. However, I did find a location that had a clear view of most of the lake (aside from one building that was right in the touchdown zone! I wasn’t around for much of the traffic but I did get to see a few arrivals and departures. Looking down on the flights and having some scenery behind them including the cityscape rather than the sky is a nice change. I may have to try this out again at a busier time.

America’s Car Museum

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The onset of shorter days and less reliable weather (or at least weather that can be relied on to be crummy) means day trips to indoor places. Nancy thought a trip to Tacoma to look at the LeMay collection in America’s Car Museum would be a good plan and she wasn’t wrong. I have seen this museum many times as I drive south on I-5 but hadn’t given much thought to it before. A couple of days before Nancy suggested it, a friend of mine back in California told me he would be going there in the spring so obviously everyone else was thinking about it but me.

The museum is a cool looking structure. An asymmetric curved roof based one a wooden interior frame, it sits on a hillside next to the Tacoma Dome overlooking the harbor. The museum is on multiple levels so, while the building doesn’t look to extensive, it provides a lot of space for the large collection of vehicles. I shall be showing a few specific examples of cars from the collection in upcoming posts but, for the time being, you can get an idea of the overall museum.

The Candid Really is Russian

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The Antonov 124 is a reasonably regular visitor to the US when outsized cargo needs to be moved. It is often commented on as being a Russian plane but, while one of the operators is a Russian company and some of the aircraft were assembled in Russia, the design and much of the production is actually Ukrainian. Ilyushin, on the other hand, really is a Russian company. Their IL-76 is also operated for freight services but it doesn’t show up anything like as frequently. Consequently, when a Volga Dnepr example was scheduled in to SeaTac on a Friday afternoon, I was pretty annoyed I would miss it. However, it ended up being seven hours late so arrived well after dark.

Departure the following day was going to be a practical proposition for me (and many others as it happened). The weather was not going to be ideal with low cloud and rain but, when the visitor is a rarity, you don’t get to choose whether to go based on weather. Fortunately, the departure was a lot closer to schedule than the arrival. I drove past the cargo ramp and saw it parked up and all closed up so did wonder whether it would go on time but things were working well and they headed out.

This aircraft was the newer variant with the PS90 engines and takeoff performance was pretty good. I had worried it would be low on the climb out and not in a good position to photograph but it climbed well and was in a good position to get a shot. I had a big grin once it had gone as did the rest of the people waiting for it.