Max7 Number Two

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The first Max7 test aircraft got a blog posting here but I have now seen the second in action too.  I think I first saw it on the ramp at Renton but I didn’t see the registration so can’t be sure.  Now it is engaged in testing and flying regularly out of Boeing Field.  It actually departed as I pulled up, so I only got to watch it rather than get a shot.  It was a bit overcast then anyway.

Later in the day it returned and this time the light was a lot more favorable.  I have yet to be able to gauge it against a 700 series and see the increase in length but the bigger engines are pretty obvious.  Still not a huge number of orders so we shall see whether it becomes a success but, in the meantime, we shall see them testing in the area for a while.

Freeway Interchange

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Dallas is a place that has a lot of highways.  Big highways and smaller ones but lots of them.  The interchanges take up a lot of space but I guess in Texas you have a lot of space.  The patterns of an interchange are best appreciated from the air.  In this case it was the window of an Alaska jet heading in to Love Field so not the ideal platform but it did quite a good job all the same.

Titan II Installation

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The Titan IV at Evergreen isn’t the only Titan there.  They also have a Titan II ICBM.  This is installed upright in a recreation of the launch facility that would originally have been buried deep under a remote part of the US countryside.  You can walk down and check out the control facilities (probably a touch closer to the silo than would originally have been the case) as well as get down to the base of the silo where the twin nozzles of the missile are.  Looking up at the missile from down there is quite an impressive sight.

The Titans were liquid fueled rockets.  The process of getting them ready for launch was a lot more complex than for the solid fueled rockets like the Minuteman that replaced them so they were a lot less responsive.  However, they fulfilled their role for a long time.  They also had a secondary career as manned launchers.  The Titan II was the launch vehicle for the Gemini missions so it is a lot more familiar to most people than would be the case for the average ICBM!

Tulip Festival

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The Skagit Valley sits about an hour north of Seattle and is home to a lot of tulip farms.  The spring is the time for the tulip festival.  Unfortunately, the beginning of the festival was not a great time for us to get up there with other things going on.  However, as things calmed down for us, we were able to get up there towards the end of things.  We may have missed the peak time but there was still some impressive stuff to see (and hopefully quite a few less people!).

The fields were absolutely full of tulips.  They filled your field of view and you quickly became blasé about the vibrance of color around you.  Finding a way to try and convey the sight was a little trickier.  The thing I did find particularly visually appealing was the way that people would be walking along the paths between the flowers but appear to be afloat in a sea of flowers.  They were all busy photographing themselves in amongst the tulips so were not aware that they were the subject of more than one photo.

Flying Pancake

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A long time ago, I was part of an ISAP symposium held in Dallas.  During the field trip day, we went to a number of locations, all of which were very interesting.  One of them was the restoration facility at what was then the Vought factory, now Triumph I think.  This was run by volunteers that had retired from the plant and was working on a number of projects including painting an F4U while we were there.  Another project that was a work in progress was the Flying Pancake.  At the time is was skinless and in a rotating frame to allow everyone to work on it more conveniently.

Roll forward to now and I was at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Dallas Love Field.  The museum is the home of the finished restoration.  The aircraft looks fantastic.  The restoration team did a great job.  To see it completed including the huge propellers is something special.  Fortunately, there is a mezzanine level above the plane so it is possible to see it from a number of angles.  Great job everyone involved.

My First Latitude – Now They are Everywhere

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This post is a little late in coming to fruition but it is even more the case now than when I first wrote it.  The corporate jet market has been in a bit of a slump for a while but one thing that is likely to provide a boost is a new model.  Cessna launched the Latitude jet a few years ago.  An evolution of their existing line, it took parts of the Sovereign and combined them with a new fuselage.  (As an aside, I have never been a fan of the Sovereign.  The fin looks like a barn door on it.  The larger fuselage of the Latitude actually suits the fin size a lot better so things are a bit more in proportion.  Still, not many of the Cessna jets are that elegant in my mind.)

The one at the top of this post was the first Latitude I got to photograph.  I did see a test jet take off from Wichita Mid Continent when I was there visiting friends but I didn’t have a camera.  They are easy to identify with the gently upcurved wingtips.  Having seen this one, I have since come across a bunch of them.  It appears that the arrival of the new type attracted a bunch of customers and Cessna was ready to build to meet that demand.  Now I don’t consider them particularly noteworthy.

Rusty Discoloration

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The Riverwalk along the Chicago River takes you under the bridges.  Each bridge is on a cycle for refurbishment so, while they are repainted regularly, they do progressively show signs of weathering.  Some of them are rather old structures with the iron and riveting being something of a period long gone.  I stopped for a while to look at the different colors that the gentle corrosion created.  Nothing too drastic but an interesting contrast with the original paint color.

Skyray – Or Is It?!

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The A-4 Skyhawk had a long and illustrious career in many air forces around the world.  It has a close cousin that didn’t fair so well.  The Skyray shared a few design cues with the Skyhawk but it was designed as a fighter rather than an attack aircraft (although the Skyhawk spent a lot of time as an adversary fighter over the years).  I find the Skyray a more attractive aircraft than the Skyhawk (not that I have anything against the Skyhawk) but that might be more about the rarity value.

I thought I had come across one parked in the parking lot of the Evergreen Aerospace Museum in McMinnville Oregon.  I was surprised to find it there at all and more so to see it sitting outside.  I am not sure what the future is for the jet – obviously some parts are removed for the time being – but I hope it will make it in to restoration.  It certainly is worthy of a good home.  That is even more true because it is not a Skyray.  It is actually a Skylancer.  This was a development of the Skyray that got so modified that it became a new type.  It never got to production and this example was used by NASA before retirement.  In this location, it is possible to get up on the earth bank behind it to get an angle that might be trickier if it ends up inside the museum.

Steve McQueen’s Bike

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This bike was apparently owned by Steve McQueen.  I seem to have seen a bunch of cars and bikes that he apparently owned so I guess he was a keen collector of motorized transport.  The style of the bike is definitely old but that wasn’t what caught my eye.  Instead, the sidecar was what I liked.  It appeared to have been styled and constructed like a boat.  It seemed rather out of place compared to the bike but it was definitely interesting.  It was tucked under something else which made getting a shot of it a bit tricky but worth it all the same.