This one caught me out. I was at SFO getting some shots when I heard Etihad call up on the tower frequency. I didn’t realize that Etihad flew to SFO and then saw the plane was a Jet Airways 777-300ER – an Indian airline. I was a bit confused by all of this so took some shots thinking it was something unusual going on. Turns out it is not unusual. Etihad have leased some jets from Jet Airways to allow them to add service while they are short on jets of their own. This was one of those jets.
Just a quick post today. I have been to Nut Tree Airport a few times. There is an old Howard 500 parked up at one side of the field. I had never taken a picture of it since it was a bit out of the way. For some reason, I completely forgot about it when they had the Mustangs Day when it would have been easy to wander over and get a shot. I forgot! So, when in Vacaville recently for something else, I popped across briefly to get a couple of shots over the fence. Just something to prove to myself that I had seen it!
The merger of American Airlines and USAirways is now getting close to the point where the two airlines become one. A lot of the USAirways aircraft and undergoing the repainting process to the colors of the combined airline. It won’t be too long before they have all gone and another airline’s colors will be consigned to history. Given that there is enthusiasm for retro schemes, some will remain. However, I thought I would have a little retrospective of some USAirways planes.
There are two liveries that dominate the shots I have. I flew on USAirways in the 90s but don’t have much to show of the colors that they had then (or the US Air name!). They have a big fleet so the transition won’t be instant but it will suddenly occur to me that the old colors aren’t showing up any more. In advance of that time, here are some samples of the old colors.
Hiller Aviation Museum has another aircraft I find interesting. This is the AD-1 Oblique Wing research aircraft from NASA. I have crossed paths with this machine before. I have seen it at Hiller before but it was also still at Edwards when I paid a visit to the NASA facility there in 1990. The oblique wing concept is an interesting one. Swing wing aircraft aim to combine he low speed and high speed characteristics required into one plane by having multiple wing sweep angles. The oblique wing approach aims to simplify this by having a single wing that pivots. The sweep angle is the same but eh CG is unaffected and the pivot mechanism much simpler.
Forward swept wings are fine so, while the oblique wing looks odd, it should be practical. It will have some interesting aeroelastic issues to be dealt with but, it should be possible to engineer. Whether it will then deliver the benefits has never been tested. The AD-1 was a low speed research aircraft only but it flew many times over the years it was in service. Now it hangs from the roof of the museum.
“You don’t know what you’ve lost ‘til it’s gone” as the song goes. These days a number of aircraft types are fading away and the previous lack of interest shown when they were commonplace gets replaced with a sudden wish to make the most of their final days. One type that is likely to be disappearing from the skies around here before too long is the Embraer EMB120 Brasilia.
It isn’t disappearing in total but the largest operator of the type around here is Skywest. Skywest uses the Brasilia for their services and for those of United Express. However, the relatively small capacity of the type is making them uneconomical to operate – something the age of the airframes is probably not helping. I think I have only flown on one a couple of times when I was connecting on Comair from Cincinnati to Greenville-Spartanburg (and back) in 1990. I recall it being a rather noisy beast inside.
As Skywest draws down their fleet, they will soon be gone. Ahead of that time, here are a few shots I have gathered over the years.
I took a trip to the Hiller Aviation Museum recently. The trip was to see a speaker who was appearing there and that will be part of another post. However, I did have a good look around the museum while I was there. Located on San Carlos Airport, I have been to the museum a few times in the past when I was visiting the area for work but I hadn’t been since we moved west. My buddy, Hayman, is a volunteer there so I have no excuse for not having been recently!
A few things have changed since I was last there. The SST mockup has now gone freeing up some space for other exhibits. This post isn’t a comprehensive review of all that is there. It is more a focus on some of the things that caught my eye while I was walking around. One item I have to mention is the Boeing Condor unmanned vehicle. It is a cool thing to see but, since it is so large, it is squashed in amongst all of the other exhibits. I decided that I should try and get something to show it in all its glory. There was a balcony which would have had a better angle but that was restricted to some simulation experience. Instead, I decided to try a pano approach instead. It came outs reasonably well although taking out some of the distortion in post processing was necessary.
I had another go at a pano with the interior of the Albatross. It is a lovely looking aircraft with a great interior which is visible through the side door so getting too much of a shot of the inside was hard to do. A pano gives a bit more of a feel for the layout in there. It looks like a nice plane to take around the world!
The museum is great and the gift shop is pretty cool too. I have to admit a model helicopter left with me and now sits on my desk. It is an AW101 in Canadian rescue colors and looks pretty sharp!
After my visit to the Peninsula was done, I decided to head back to SFO. This time I wanted to have another go at head on shots. In my post here, you can read about my first efforts at this and how the heat haze was a problem. Winter has better chances since the sun is lower and the heat haze reduced. However, the sun does go down earlier so there are fewer flights departing while you can still shoot. They do tend to have nicer light though.
The Emirates and Lufthansa A380s were the main things I got while I was there. A British Airways 747 was scheduled out but the sun was dropping out of sight as he taxied so I didn’t wait. He actually took off over me while I was at the gas station. He had nice light once up high but the runway would have been in shade by then so I don’t think it was a mistake.
I also got some corporate and rotary wing movements while I was waiting. Unlike last time, the 01s are now back in use so only the heavies departed my way. It was fun to look back up the approach at some parallel arrivals and also to see the departing jets as they crossed in front of me.
Quite a few years ago, I was on a visit to NAS Fallon with my friend Richard. (You can check out his work at http://www.aviationimaging.com/ and I recommend you do.) Another buddy, Paul, was also along and the day after we were at Fallon, Paul had arranged a visit to the National Guard facility at Stead Field, north of Reno. (Paul’s work can be found at http://skippyscage.com/) This base operated a variety of helicopters including Chinooks, Black Hawks and Kiowas. It was also once the home of CH-54 Tarhes. It was in looking for pictures of the CH-54 that is preserved there that I came across the rest of the shots from that day.
I took one Chinook shot that morning that I have used a number of times but the rest of them had kind of been forgotten. We had a great time wandering through the hangars seeing what was ready for use or undergoing maintenance. The high point of the day was that a Chinook was launching and we were allowed out onto the ramp outside the fence to be in place when the Chinook taxied out and took off.
As it happened, the Chinook pulled up into the hover and stayed there for quite some time. Since I had time, I progressively lowered my shutter speed to try and get more rotor blur on the famously slow turning Chinook rotor. I had just got as low as I could go when he suddenly transitioned to forward flight. I was at totally the wrong shutter speed and ended up with some parallax issues as he flew by but it was all good.
The Chinook obviously features here a bit but I wanted to share some of the other helicopters that were there that day. It was fun to see some shots that I had forgotten about long ago.
While not a specific trip to shoot planes at SFO, I did have some time by the bay to get some shots of the planes as a result of being on the peninsula for another purpose. It was earlier on a Saturday morning that I found myself there. Winter is a better time to shoot at SFO since the heat haze is less of an issue. Even so, I was surprised to see how much haze there was for shots that were looking back towards the approach. I’m not sure if this was a result of the tide being too far out exposing the mud flats or not. The angle of the light early is also a bit far back but still there were some options.
I was pleasantly surprised by my luck while I was there. Despite there not being too much traffic, I had a couple of parallel approaches take place. One was a China Eastern A330 with a United A320 in close contact. This was a very cool thing to see. A couple of United A319s also were quite close together on another approach but they had just slightly more offset.
Lots of my retro posts come about because I was doing something else that led me to a shot I had forgotten about. Having a system like Lightroom is a great way of throwing up some interesting shots that appear when you run a keyword search. In this case, I was looking at an old air show which had featured the Blue Angels. As is usual for their shows, the first part of the demonstration was the USMC C-130 display, Fat Albert.
At the end of the display, they land the C-130 and throw the props into reverse aiming to stop as quickly as possible. (A little bit of bouncing is also apparent in the top shot!) On this occasion, I guess the ground alongside the runway was not too stable. The wash thrown forward by the props ripped the turf up ahead of the plane and threw it into the air. It made for a pretty dramatic view. Even through the viewfinder, I could see what was going on. The shots afterwards just confirmed how much material they threw around that day!
