The huge reduction in air travel – particularly long haul – has resulted in airlines taking a hatchet to their fleets. Lufthansa has been no exception with many jets parked permanently and others in long term storage with a significant question mark hanging over them. The A340-600 fleet is one such fleet. However, while a few of the A340-300s have been put out to grass, a good chunk of the fleet is still in use.
The 300 Series is an underrated airliner. The 600 has longer range and higher payload but it is optimized for the longer range missions and is too much for shorter flights. The 300 is a more versatile type as long as you are not pushing the bounds of payload/range. Consequently, it has hung around a lot longer than might have been expected. With reduced load factors, it is continuing to show its value despite it having been seen as on the way out for many years now.
Lufthansa has started using them on the Seattle run. They are coming in three days a week. The jet arrives around noon and two of the trips are Wednesday and Friday so work means they are hard to get. Sunday is the other day so I decided to give it a go. However, when I got up, flights were on a northerly flow which means no good locations to shoot from and a high and tail on light set up. Not ideal. However, by mid-morning, despite the forecast northerly winds, they had switched to a southerly flow. That meant a water tower shooting location was on the cards so off I went.
I got to the water tower in plenty of time only to notice a lack of arriving jets. Sure enough, they had switched back to a northerly flow. I now had to try and find a new location to shoot from and quickly. I had an idea for somewhere I hadn’t used before so decided to give it a go. I had time to try out on a preceding arrival and my post on that Asiana jet is here. Since things seemed to work okay, I stayed were I was and waited for the jet to arrive. Lufthansa had painted a bunch of their jets in Star Alliance colors but they are now reverting to the mainline livery and happily, that is what I was expecting. No idea how long they shall be around but I shall try again while they are coming here because they will be gone before too long I imagine.
Seeing that a National A330 was coming in to SeaTac one evening, I figured I couldn’t pass it up. Sure, they don’t come here often but they are also one of the few airlines that has a relatively interesting livery. Plus, it would be later in the day when light should be good so why not go? With SeaTac you always wonder whether the heavies will come in on the outer or inner runway. Fortunately, there was a lot of other arriving traffic at that time so it was a good bet they would come on the inner runway. A heavy can disrupt the flow of the lighter wake turbulence category jets.
That proved to be the case. They came to the inner so I was positioned well for the arrival. However, the weather wasn’t playing ball. A bunch of clouds were building off in the distance and they drifted across the sun shortly before arrival. Rainier was already obscured by cloud/haze but losing the sun was annoying. Fortunately, the silvery scheme allows a bit more tolerance of less than ideal light.
