Tag Archives: a320

AeroK – A New One for Me

A while back I got a notification of an A320 departing SEA heading to Korea from an airline called AeroK.  I didn’t have the chance to be there and wrote it off as a missed opportunity.  Then, earlier this year I got a similar notification on a weekend, so I was able to make the trip down to see this depart.  I hadn’t made the connection, but AeroK is Korea in reverse.  It is a low-cost carrier that only recently started operations.  I assume these were delivery flights for their new fleet since they won’t be operating to the US at this stage of their development.  It would be good to see more of the planes at some point.

Air Canada Instead of Jetz

It’s not unusual to see Canadian A320s in Boeing Field.  They provide a lot of sports charters but, until recently, these were usually undertaken by Jetz aircraft.  More recently, it seems that they have transitioned to jets in the Air Canada core colors.  Since Air Canada has been taking delivery of lots of 737 Max aircraft recently, maybe they are cascading some of the older mainline jets to the charter operations.  I don’t really know.  I only know I have shot a few of their aircraft at Boeing Field recently.

United’s Oldest A320 Heads West

I was reading a couple of articles that were discussing old jets getting retired.  The original MD-11 was retired by FedEx and, when I checked my catalog, I didn’t have any shots of it.  United has retired its oldest A320 so I looked for that one too.  Turns out I did shoot it once.  It was arriving at O’Hare and was painted in the colors of Ted – United’s short-lived low-cost airline.  I guess the jet lasted longer than Ted did!

Alaska’s A320s Are Gone

Alaska Airlines never wanted the Airbus fleet that it inherited when it bought Virgin America.  They did operate them for a long time and they did get repainted in Alaska colors but first the A319s were withdrawn and now the A320s are gone.  The A321neos will follow before long but here is a sample of the A320s that are now consigned to history.

GlobalX Takes UW Students to Texas

The arrival of new airlines is of interest until they become a common sight.  When they are still small, they will be picking up all sorts of jobs to get their utilization up and bring in some revenue.  This includes odd charter jobs.  The University of Washington football team had made it to a bowl game that was being held down in Texas.  GlobalX was taking a bunch of the students down to the game.  A load of coaches dropped them off on the ramp and they slowly boarded the jet.  They certainly took there time about it but, eventually, everyone was on board.

As with all unscheduled flying, the wait for departure seems to take far too long.  The doors had been closed for ages but the jet was still sitting there.  I can imagine that a plane full of students was not happy waiting to get going (or maybe they couldn’t get everyone to sit down and strap in).  Finally they taxied and departed for Texas.  I don’t think the game went well for UW but the kids probably had a good time anyway.

Specials Coming to London

Shooting at an airport you don’t normally get to shoot at means you have the opportunity to shoot airlines that you wouldn’t see otherwise.  What can be even nicer is if you get a special livery on one of these jets.  (There is a small element in the back of your head that worries about not having shot the normal livery and that you still won’t have because of the special but that churlish thought needs to be suppressed!) Three of the jets coming in from overseas were in special finishes as was one of the locals.  British Airways had an A320neo in a paint finish that was sky blue.  I actually watched it depart too when waiting to board my flight home.

Kenya Airways flies their 787s in to London.  The jet that came in on this day had a graphic of rhinos on the rear fuselage.  Not a totally different livery but a nice addition.  Brussels Airlines flies their A320s in to Heathrow and the airframe I saw was in a Tintin scheme that covered the whole airframe.  It looked really good.  Royal Jordanian was the last of my specials.  Its 787 had a graphic advertising the city of Petra which covered the side of the jet.  All nice efforts by the respective airlines.

JetRed

Early morning at Washington National and I was waiting for my flight home after a work trip to DC.  As I sat at the gate, a JetBlue aircraft was coming up from the south end of the field.  It was painted in a red scheme representative of the fire department of NY.  They have a few different special liveries on their jets but a bright red one is quite the opposite of their normal look.  Sadly, the light was a bit dull but I wasn’t passing up the opportunity to get a shot, even if it was through the terminal windows.

The Earliest A320s

A launch customer for the A320 was British Caledonian Airways.  Unfortunately for those that liked Scottish themed airlines, BCal was bought by British Airways before the jets were delivered.  I recall some dispute with Airbus about who would pay for the repaint of the first jet but maybe that is an urban legend.  I think there were ten of them and BA took delivery.  However, they were an orphan fleet for a long time in amongst all of the BA 737s and 757s.

That changed when BA went to an all A320 family short haul fleet breaking their long standing use of Boeing jets (plus some other stragglers).  However, that cam much later.  The earliest jets were A320-100s and these didn’t have the wing tip fences.  The A320-200 followed very soon afterwards.  Here are two shots of them.  One is from 1988 with an A320 in BA’s Landor scheme on approach over my head to Gatwick.  The other shot is a late in life shot of one of the earliest jets taken at Heathrow.  These early examples are all gone now.

Directly Under an A320

I did a little positioning to try and get a shot from directly under an airliner as it was making its approach to SeaTac.  I was out near Boeing Field so they were still reasonably high.  I managed to get myself right in alignment with the jet which, in this case, was an Alaska Airliners A320.  When I first saw the shot, I have to admit I thought it was an Embraer E175 but then I read the lettering under the nose and realized it was bigger than I thought.  I like the idea of a very different view of a familiar subject.

Air to Air With United Jets – Or Is It?

When putting together some images for a group online that I am involved with, a dug out a couple of shots of jets departing O’Hare I shot years back.  When coming off 22L, some of the jets make an early turn to the south and you can get a view of them that is either quite level with the wing line or slightly above.  When shooting them, they are climbing so it is obvious what you were shooting.  However, as I looked at these shots, it occurred to me that they looked a lot like an air to air position except the angles were wrong because of the climb.  Since I had shot quite tightly, re-cropping the shot required some Photoshop work.

Taking the image out of Lightroom and in to Photoshop, I selected the crop tool and rotated the image to be the sort of angle that an air to air shot might be.  Doing this crops off the nose and tail of the jet.  However, one feature of the crop tool in Photoshop is that, if you then drag the edges of the tool back out, you can expand the canvas size.  You now have the whole plane in shot but have added some white space in each corner where no image previously existed.

It is a simple task to then use Content Aware Fill to add sky back in to these areas.  The result is a shot that looks almost as if you had been flying in formation at altitude.  Would you have spotted it?  Having done it with an A320, I then had a go with a 757.  The light angle makes it look a bit like we are flying along towards a setting sun.  I was rather pleased with the trick.