North of Seattle is Arlington and the airport at Arlington is home to Eviation, a company developing an electric powered aircraft called Alice. They undertook some low speed taxi trials during December but plans for high speed taxi and flight were thwarted by consistently bad weather. A recent nice day on a Sunday looked like the first opportunity to do some testing again and a NOTAM was published meaning we knew something was up.
I met my buddy, Bob, up at Arlington and Alice was already out on the field when we got there. The time for the testing was at the end of the day so they were preparing for when the runway was theirs to use. Sadly, the aircraft was not playing ball. As is the way with flight test, things were not necessarily doing what they were supposed to. They did run one of the motors up to speed but the other failed to perform and resulted in the first shutting down too. Not ideal for an aircraft. No doubt they will resolve such things in due course. By the time they had spent some time troubleshooting, the sun was setting and there was going to be no taxi trial.
I chose the side of the field that was backlit since it was closer to where the testing would take place. Some great shots from the other side with the setting sun on the mountains behind were made by others. However, I was in the right spot when they dragged the plane back to the hangar. Things were getting pretty dark and I was very pleased to have brought the 70-200 f/2.8 with me since it did a great job with the lack of light. The raw images looked very subdued but they really came out well when I processed them.
I put together a piece for GAR on what we had seen. You can see that piece here if you want to check it out. It seems to have generated a lot of traffic which suggests there is a lot of interest in some of these electric aircraft projects. Whether they will be successful or not, we shall see. In the meantime, the weather got bad again but we shall hopefully have a break in it soon and a chance to see them taxiing the plane and then flying it.
Plenty of 737 Max jets are changing their colors at the moment. The cancellation clauses of the purchase contracts have allowed a bunch of airlines to cancel their orders without penalty as a result of the extended delays in delivery – something that may have been welcome during the pandemic! Boeing has seen an uptick in demand for airframes recently and has been mostly successful in reselling these finished airframes.
This one showed up recently at Boeing Field. It is all white so may have been identified as problematic before it ever got painted in airline colors. The people I was chatting too had no idea where it was due to go and whether it could even be a BBJ. No doubt it will soon find a home if it hasn’t already.
