I spent a little time at Haneda on a recent trip to Tokyo. It was not an ideal day for photography but it had its possibilities. One thing that really surprised me was that I seemed to see a bunch of planes with special paint schemes. I don’t know whether Japanese airlines just have a lot of specials or whether Haneda is the place that they all come but I saw a lot. One of them was from China too. Here are some shots of the specials from that day excluding one that will have its own post.
For a long time, Smith Tower was the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Now there are many buildings in Seattle alone that are taller than it is but it is still a building that stands out. However, I had never visited it prior to some friends coming to town and suggesting we check it out. The bottom of the building has a series of exhibits showing the history of the building and how it was used. Then you take the elevator to the top of the tower and the lounge that is up there.
The lounge has some old wood paneling and it has a bar and food service so we took the option of getting some lunch while we were up there. In addition, there is a balcony that wraps around the top of the tower so you can make a circumnavigation and check out the views in all directions. The tower is at the opposite end of the town from the Space Needle so you get a very different perspective on the city. Also, you are outside with just fencing between you and the outside so taking pictures is a lot easier with no screens or windows to navigate.
I have shown a bunch of images of the Dreamlifter bringing in components to Paine Field for the production line including shots of the unloading of parts. During a more recent visit, I happened to be there when they were moving a pair of wings from the storage facility to the production facility across the airfield. They had escort vehicles to lead and follow up as they crossed the runway. The wings look a lot less impressive in the travel jigs. The completed 787 looks substantial but the wings alone don’t provide the same impact.
I was pondering the content of the gallery on my website. I hadn’t updated it for a long time and thought there were plenty of shots that should be in there that weren’t. I started compiling a folder of shots for the revised gallery. I thought I should check the old gallery to see which shots I should carry across and, when I went to open it on the website, it didn’t work. It turned out the design was not compatible with current browser design! I have no idea how long it has been out of commission.
I looked at what options there were for alternative gallery designs and was struggling to find one that I liked that did something special. In the end, when concluding that a simple design was what I was going to end up with, I went with one of the templates within Lightroom. That made creating and updating the gallery a lot simpler. The revised gallery is now online at the link at the top of this page or, if you can’t be bothered to click up there, here is the link.
The Slingsby T-67 was a design that was quite popular when I was younger. They were aerobatic and were used for training by a number of establishments. I didn’t think of it as a plane that got much traction outside the UK market but maybe they did okay. Seeing one in the US was a bit of a surprise. This example was taking off at Paine Field. I wondered whether it was an ex-military example that had been sold to the civil market. If anyone knows the background, do let me know.
While we got to Butchart Gardens before the sun set as seen in this post, the purpose of the visit was to see the illuminations. I had been there before during the day and knew it was a pretty garden but I didn’t know what to expect with the illuminations. I thought it might be pretty but was not expecting it to be so dramatic. The first are had some lovely lights within the trees with animated icicles. We then followed a route around the gardens to cover all of the areas. These areas also included displays themed around the twelve days of Christmas.
One area that really blew me away was a section under tree cover where they had lasers mounted on the tree trunks that scattered their light into the canopy above. The effect was magical and I spent a long time looking up at it as well as trying to get a decent shot of it. On one, the lens wasn’t originally zoomed out and so it drifted a little in zoom. The result was rather good but not what was needed. I like it but it will stay out of public sight.
Walking down in to the valley below the main house, the lighting was absolutely amazing. The density of light installations and the use of color was really impressive. The use of trees and plants to catch the light was great as was the use of some of the surrounding rock. They also had some streams of blue lights to give the effect of flowing water.
We had arrived at the gardens before the sun went down and we got in very quickly. There was no traffic. As a result, we had seen the whole display after dark relatively early in the evening. We were able to head back to town and, as we started to drive out, the traffic coming in was awful. We were sailing out but the cars were backed up the hill. I imagine it would take a long time to get in. I think our timing worked well.
The 737 Max 8 has been the best seller of the Max product line. The Max 7 has barely sold at all and Boeing even had to redesign it to be a shrink of the Max 8 rather than the rework of the -700 that it was originally intended to be. Southwest and WestJet have bought them but they are about the only ones. I guess production examples have started to come off the line during the grounding. When you go around the back of Renton, amongst the stored Southwest jets are a bunch of the Max 7s. I guess certification and delivery of these will be something intended to follow on closely from the return to service of the Max 8 and Max 9 jets.
The ferry ride from Swartz Bay back to Tsawwassen was on a day that wasn’t particularly nice weather wise. And we emerged in to the open water from the islands, I was wandering about with the camera. The view to the mountains north of Vancouver opened up and they were in clear sunlight with the snow reflecting the warm winter light beautifully. It was a distant shot but a panorama seemed to be a good idea. Everyone on the boat seemed to be taking notice and plenty of people came out on deck to take their photos.
I read that Cranfield is getting a new SAAB 340 to be used as a flying testbed. It is replacing the current Jetstream 31. The plane is used for test work but it is also used as a flying classroom for aeronautical engineering students. The Jetstream 31 was an old BAE Systems airframe (one I was involved with in my days at Warton) and it replaced a Jetstream 200. That old Astazou powered airframe was in use in the late 80s when I went through the course. Here are shots of that old plane when we were using it as well as the current one when it showed up at RIAT.
Seeing logs on the shore is not unusual. Plenty of logs get washed ashore. However, when taking a walk along the beach at Shoreline over the holidays, there was a tree trunk that had become lodged on the water’s edge. It had become wedged in amongst some piles in the water with the roots of the log still out in the water. Usually the logs appear to have been cut but this was a tree that had got washed out into the sound. Everyone was taking a look at it or climbing out on to it. It was pretty big and finding a way to convey the size was something I pondered at length.
