Easy to Guess Who You Work For

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At was at BFI awaiting the arrival of something and I was checking FlightRadar24 to see what was coming in. I saw a Learjet 60 on the screen south of SeaTac and tapped on it. As soon as I saw the flight path, it was clear who the jet belonged to. The shot below was what I saw and the repeated patterns around SeaTac suggested it was an FAA aircraft undertaking calibration flights for the airport instrumentation.

I stopped thinking about it for a while until I saw a jet appear on the approach to BFI that I hadn’t been aware of. Sure enough, it was the FAA Lear 60. They plonked it down right on the keys and quickly exited to the FBO. I imagine that flying repeated sequences of approaches is not the most exciting way to spend the day so they were glad of the break.

Hiram M Chittenden Locks

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Just north of the center of Seattle is Ballard. Aside from being an interesting area with shops, bars and restaurants, it is also home to a set of locks that connect the salt waters of Puget Sound with Lake Union and Lake Washington’s fresh waters. The locks are the busiest in the US with a steady stream of traffic. On the weekend, this is heavily dominated by pleasure craft but commercial vessels are also a big feature. Indeed, while we were there, we found out that there is a hierarchy of which types of vessel get to go through first, even if some of the owners of the small pleasure craft were not up to speed on the rules!

The locks are named after the man who was instrumental in the early phases of their construction. Aside from leading a big construction project, he also was quite visionary in other areas but that will be the topic of another post soon. There are actually two locks. One is a small lock that suits pleasure craft or small commercial vessels. The other is far broader and longer and can be operated with a middle set of gates if less vessels are coming through. It can also take a lot of smaller boats wedged together like a giant game of Tetris when demand is high such as is the case on warm holiday weekends.

The locks are open to the public along with a small botanic garden. You can cross over the top of the gates (although these are rather narrow and can get congested when people decide to stop and hang around rather than keep moving). There is plenty of space along the sides of the locks to watch the boats as they come in and as they rapidly rise or fall when the water levels are adjusted. We obviously weren’t the only ones to find it a relaxing spot to hang out for a while.

Floatplane Fest

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I was in Vancouver for a few days for work and I managed to catch up with my buddy Mark when I arrived. He suggested to me a good opportunity for shooting the floatplanes is at the end of the day from Brockton Point in Stanley Park. I had only shot them from the shore near the convention center (other than an opportunist shot or two while walking in the park and that doesn’t count) so I was interested to see how this location worked out. I managed to get out of work at a good time one evening and the weather was looking very nice so it was off to the park for me.

This location is a lot of fun. In the evening, the light is well positioned and, at this time of year, the sun is lower and the light is nice and just gets better and better as the evening sets in. The aircraft were arriving from the east so they were very distant but it is the departures that we were after. The planes head along the shore from the base and then turn towards you and start their run. Often, they are pointing straight at you for a while.

Depending on the type and the pilot, they can climb steeply or can keep it nice and low as they come by. Sometimes, there might be a boat on their preferred take off run and, since they have to divert to one side which can result in a nice turn back towards you as they round the point and head to Lion’s Gate. The Otters are the most common type with the Beavers coming second. There are still some Twin Otters but they are a lot less common than they used to be so they end up being more interesting when they show up. How can it be that I get complacent about seeing Otters on floats? (The fact we have them in Seattle too probably doesn’t help!)

Mark certainly called this one correctly. Brockton Point is a nice place to hang out on a sunny fall evening in any circumstances but the addition of a steady stream of floatplanes to this makes for a wonderful combination is you are someone like me. What’s more, it is a reliable option. Until the winter light stops flying at the end of the afternoon, you have scheduled departures to rely on so this is not a case of turning up in the hope of seeing something. You will definitely get plenty of planes.

The Red Pandas are Performers

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Visiting the zoo is often a game of hide and seek with the animals. They live according to their normal schedules and are not inclined to be active just because you happen to be there. They also will find a favored location in their enclosure which is not putting them on display to the animals on the other side of the glass. You may catch a glimpse of something sleeping in a shadowy space or you may wonder whether the animal is even in there.

When we got to the red panda enclosure, I was half expecting to not see very much. I figured this would be another reclusive creature. I was wrong. I don’t know whether they are naturally energetic creatures, whether they are curious about their visitors or whether some unseen motivation is given to them to get out there but these guys were the exact opposite of what I had anticipated. They had a number of trees within their space and they were very happy to zip around through the branches. This often brought them right up front to where the visitors were standing. They would happily motor about, stare at the people, head back, disappear for a while before reappearing and repeating the process. Their public was suitably appreciative.

A Surprise Appearance of This Two-Seater

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Paine Field is the home of Paul Allen’s collection which includes a MiG29UB. I had seen it being dragged around the airport once but had never seen it fly. I was there to catch the Catfish, as described in this post, when a loud engine noise came from the right. I hadn’t been paying attention but, when the MiG taxied towards us, I certainly did. It came right by where I was and then held at the end of the runway before lining up and departing – sadly in dry power only. It was a bit far away and the heat haze was bad but who wouldn’t take a shot anyway?

Roslyn/Cicely Alaska

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If you are not too young, you may have watched a TV show in the 90s called Northern Exposure. Set in the fictional town of Cicely Alaska, it revolved around a young doctor from New York who had been sponsored through school and, in order to fulfill his sponsorship obligations, had to go and work in this remote town. It was a quirky show and I liked it. It wasn’t filmed in Alaska though. The exterior work was mainly done in a town called Roslyn that sits just on the other side of the Cascades from Seattle. We decided to take a trip.

Roslyn was a mining town for many years. However, when the coal became too uneconomic to mine, things got very quiet. There is a little museum in the center of the town which includes a display outside of some of the mining equipment. There is also a memorial to the miners including a lengthy list of those that lost their lives in the mines.

There are a few buildings that you might recognize from the TV show. The opening sequence of the show includes a moose wandering around the town and passing a café called Roslyn’s Café. The apostrophe and s were added for that sequence but the Roslyn Café is still there and we had a good lunch inside. The doctor’s office is now a gift shop in which you can get plenty of Northern Exposure related goodies. The tavern that was central to the show, The Brick, is also there although clearly the interior shots were done on a stage since it looks very different.

The drive to Roslyn takes you across the Cascades via Snoqualmie Pass and it is a pretty drive on its own but Roslyn was a fun place to visit. It is a small town with a few interesting shops and no shortage of places to eat and drink. We also wandered out of the center a bit, up the hill to see the local church. Then we headed on our way.

787 Development Jets

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Two versions of the Boeing 787 have been in service for a while. However, development activities continue. The 787-10 is still undergoing flight test but work also continues on the older jets. Some of this is also related to the Dash 10. I had a post on my first encounter with the 787-10 which I wrote about here. I have since come across another of the test aircraft. This one is plain white and doesn’t benefit from the nice house colors that Boeing has.

Meanwhile, one of the 787-8 test aircraft has recently been testing the newest version of the Rolls Royce Trent 1000. I saw this engine when it was being tested on Rolls’ testbed in Tucson and that was in this post. Now it has been fitted to its intended platform and is undergoing trials. These have included lengthy flights around the US including one in which they traced out the planform of the aircraft across multiple states. If you are going to go flying for 18 hours, you might as well find a way to have fun with it. The aircraft is carrying the same logo on the engine nacelle that was on the testbed. Hopefully, the delayed upgraded engine will soon be in service, not just on the Dash 10 but also on the other variants.

Macaws of Different Colors

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The Macaw is a bird that really looks like it has been created for our amusement. The bright colors and personality of the birds combined with their intelligence makes them instantly attractive. We can forget for a while that they are the way they are because they are adapted for the environment in which they live (by which I don’t mean a zoo).

We saw a few of them at Cougar Mountain Zoo. Some of them were out on perches in the zoo grounds. A few were brought up to a stage to demonstrate their intelligence and dexterity. They really are a quite amazing bird. While it is easy to be impressed by their capabilities, you don’t ever forget how amazing they look. The vivid colors and the fascinating shape make it easy to just spend time watching them. What a fantastic creature.

T-45 Nose Gear Door Sequencing

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With a title like that, who could resist reading this one! The T-45 is a plane I have a close affinity with. It was my involvement with the project that first brought me to work in the US and it is responsible for me meeting Nancy. Aside from that, I got quite involved in many aspects of the plane’s design so feel like I know it quite well. It did not have a smooth entry to service and went through a multitude of upgrades prior to being accepted in to service. One of the lesser known items was the nose gear doors.

These were lumped in to a bunch of issues relating to directional stability. The front fuselage of the T-45 is considerably deeper than the original Hawk but the design originally had the same fin and actually lost the ventral fins that were either side of the airbrake on the original. Directional control was enhanced by adding a fin cap, modifying the rudder design and adding a new ventral fin on the arrestor hook fairing. One other change was made too.

The carrier launch requirements meant the simple nose gear was replaced with a far chunkier assembly with dual wheels and the catapult launch bar, all of which was beefier enough to take the catapult launch loads. Covering this all up were big nose gear doors. These were originally either open or closed. If you look at the doors, you can see they are like adding large fins to the front fuselage. This is very destabilizing. The rear doors must stay open when the gear is down but the front doors were rescheduled to close again once the gear was down, making a substantial difference in directional stability. They have to open while the gear is transitioning and stability is reduced during this phase but it doesn’t last long. However, if you watch the retraction and extension sequence, you get a brief glimpse at how big these doors really are. From what I understand, a similar issue affected the F-35 and only the first airframe, AA-1, had the old single huge gear door.

Waterfall Park

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I was with a couple of colleagues in downtown Seattle between meetings. We were walking along the street just killing some time when we came upon Waterfall Park. Tucked on the corner of a block in amongst the buildings, it is a little area with a waterfall (what a shock I hear you cry) running down an artificial rock face into a pool. It seems set up to provide a restful spot for workers to enjoy in the middle of the day. Indeed, it closes by mid-afternoon. There was a security guy on duty so maybe someone has tried to mess with it in the past which is rather disappointing. I only had my phone with me but hopefully you can get a feel for the spot.