The tide was obviously low when we were at Pescadaro State Beach. The exposed rocks were showing all sorts of signs of what might live under the water. There were large outcrops of mussels attached to the rocks. They were sealed up tight waiting for the tide to come back in when they could open up again to feed.
A trip to the beach can only be improved on by one thing. Fast jets! A four ship of T-38s flew over while we were walking on the beach. What more can I ask for?
Nancy and I included a trip to Pescadaro State Beach as part of our weekend in Half Moon Bay. There are a number of lovely looking beaches on this stretch of the coast but the guide books suggested this was a good one so we headed there. It is a lovely location with a lot of rocky outcrops upon which the waves crash. We strolled along the shore and enjoyed the waves thundering into the rocks, sometimes sending plumes of spray way up into the air. I love waves and could watch them for hours.
Aviation Partners Boeing has been very effective over the years in getting their technology into mainline airline service. The winglets they developed for the Boeing 737 have been very widely adopted with installations on 300 Series, 700 Series, 800 Series and 900 Series jets around the world. The BBJs have also had them extensively. I don’t think any new 737s are delivered without them. The programs for the 757 and 767 have also been well adopted.
The 737 Max is going to have a new winglet design that Boeing have created. However, it is a way from flying. Meanwhile, APB has not stood still and they have created a new winglet design that has a downward portion mated to an updated winglet under the name scimitar. This is now making an appearance on a lot of jets as a retrofit. Southwest, United and Alaska have all started rolling the installation out.
I like the look of the new design. The tip seems to be a bit of a styling effort. The downward facing portion is well aligned to avoid creating a drag inducing choke area at the root. The configuration is actually quite reminiscent of the original winglet designs in the paper Richard Whitcomb wrote when first proposing the concept. I suspect we shall be seeing a lot more of them in the future.
I was flying from the Midwest back to California a few weeks back and had to change planes in Las Vegas. This is not one of my favorite things to do as I find the airport in Vegas to be horribly depressing. However, the route to Vegas took us close to the Grand Canyon. The crew announced that we were coming up on the Canyon so I got the camera out. Shooting through aircraft windows is never a great task but it was still cool to see so here is a little of what the view was like.
Aside from the basketball game at Wichita State, there was plenty of entertainment between the plays, Various competitions were held for people to try and win prizes and the cheering squad were there too. The cheerleaders did their thing and a section of guys spent a lot of time lifting the cheerleaders into the air, throwing them up and (fortunately) catching them again. Fun stuff to watch.
The President was visiting the Bay Area for a couple of days recently. This meant the arrival of Air Force One, the VH-3D helicopters, the C-17s to transport them and the V-22s that support the VH-3Ds. What more could an aviation guy want? I took a look at the temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) listed online to see when the airspace was going to be shut down. When the president flies, the airspace around him is shut down for security purposes. These closures are published (otherwise, how would the other pilots know not to fly) so it means we know when to expect things to happen.
Sadly, the arrival was on a day I was at work and was timed to come in to SFO around sunset so, even if I could be there, there was a chance that the light would have gone. (As it was, the arrival was just before the light went completely and a friend of mine did get some good shots.) The departure, on the other hand, was scheduled for Saturday morning. That I could manage. I figured that getting there early would be wise since I would not be the only one trying this so getting somewhere to park might be tricky. Plus, if they went early in the slot, I wanted to be ready.
I checked the TFR the night before and got up early the next morning. I had some breakfast and headed out. I arrived in plenty of time but did need to park quite a distance away. I got to the bayshore trail and found a few other guys with cameras. However, word quickly reached me that he had gone. I bumped into a friend of mine and he told me that he had checked the TFR earlier that morning and saw that it had been brought forward. He rushed out and got there just in time. I arrived about 20 minutes after they took off. Curiously, as I had been driving across the San Mateo bridge, I had seen a large jet airborne near the airport and wondered. Now I knew.
There was a silver lining to this disappointment. With Air Force One safely on its way, the V-22s were free to head out. The three of them took off in close succession and turned in our direction to head off down the peninsula. They didn’t come terribly close but I did get my first shots of them since they replaced the CH-46s that used to provide support. (Many moons ago I did see the CH-53Es that used to be undertake this role. They looked fantastic!)
A work trip had me in Oklahoma City one week and needing to be back the next. I did have the option to fly home and then come back again. However, the length of the trip meant that I would get back and then quickly be back on my way again. Instead, I decided to stay over for the weekend. This was because I had a Plan B. My good friends Steve and Alysia live in Wichita Kansas which is just over two hours north of Oklahoma City so, after work on Friday, I headed up to see them for the weekend.
We had a fun time for the weekend, parts of which will appear in the blog in due course. One thing they had planned was to go and see a Wichita State basketball game. The Shockers were at home and a packed crowd was there to see them. We had to do some research to find out whether taking a camera in was allowed or not and it was so I dragged the camera along. I wasn’t shooting the game really. I just wanted to get some shots to see how they came out.
The stadium appeared bright until you looked at a light meter. I needed to ramp the ISO up quite a bit which I did by switching to manual mode and then using Auto ISO. It worked pretty well. A couple of shots were a bit dark but that will be the case with any shooting mode if the metering gets confused. (My bodies are of a previous generation which does not have the ability to input exposure compensation in this mode. The 1DX does allow that. No idea why it took so long to show up but that is a different story.)
I did manage to get a few action shots. There was not a huge amount of dunking going on but I did catch a couple of more dramatic drives to the hoop. More importantly, I had a great time with Steve and Alysia. Thanks guys for setting up a great day out.
Last summer my friend Paul had been across and we had hatched a plan to shot some time lapse and night streak shots of SFO from a hill that overlooks the airport. The plan seemed like a good one but it was thwarted by two things. First, there was some cloud in the area which obscured some fo the view. Second, it doesn’t get dark until late in the summer and Paul was on UK time so was pretty worn out by the time we could do anything.
Instead, we concluded that a second attempt would be made when he was over during the winter. So it was that we found ourselves back up on the hill. We had come well prepared this time with sturdy tripods and good cable releases. The only thing I had forgotten was the chairs since you have a lot of time to hang around on a dark hillside taking shots like this. I took a long sequence of shots that would be edited into the time lapse. When I got home, some quick work in LRTimelapse and the video was together as you can see below. I also decided to see how well the sequence would blend together to get a streak image. I have never tried to work with quite so many layers in Photoshop before. It certainly struggled with it but it did work. Unfortunately, there must have been some very slight movement on the tripod because the ground lights did not exactly align which made for a blurry foreground when using the Lighten blend mode. To counter this, I duplicated one of the base layers and masked that back in to give the ground a clearer image. The blended version is the one at the top of the post.
The Boeing P-8 Poseidon is not a new plane. In fact, it first flew in 2009. Why is it, then, that I have never seen one in flight before? I have seen them on the ground at various times. This has included air shows and seeing them on the flightline at Boeing Field. I have come close a number of times there including some of the Indian Navy Ark variants that have been undergoing testing. Despite all of this, I had not seen one fly.
Fortunately, I have finally overcome this shortcoming, if only briefly. I found myself at Boeing Field on a recent trip to Seattle where I was eating my lunch between landing from a flight and heading off to a meeting. A pretty narrow window in which to hope to get anything interesting but, this time, I was lucky. The P-8 taxied out shortly after I got there and lined up. He wasn’t going for a takeoff at first. A surge of power and acceleration down the runway followed by an application of the brakes and the rejected takeoff test was done. This meant a trip back down the taxiway and right past me to get back to the threshold.
The second time was supposed to be the full takeoff and the lightly loaded jet was promptly airborne and heading off to carry out its tests. It would be gone for a few hours so I wasn’t going to catch its return but it was great to finally see one moving and flying.
