Unusual visitors to an airport are obviously welcome and give you the chance to get something new. However, that also means you want to make sure you get the shot so you don’t want to experiment too much with settings. Having someone bashing the circuit for a long time and flying a variety of different approaches means that you can take as many shots as you like and try all sorts of different things.
My Sunday at Paine Field included a pretty smart looking Quest Kodiak doing some training flights. Lots of approaches, some straight in and others curving. All the opportunity I could want. Wide shots, tight shots, how low will I dare go with the shutter speed? I had the 1.4X teleconverter on the 500mm so shooting at 1/100th of a second at 700mm is going to have a pretty low success rate but I was pleasantly surprised how many came out nice and sharp. Not bad to have a day of panning practice.
The Kodiak is an interesting looking plane. Having a turbine means a nice high prop speed on approach which certainly helps but it is also something that can be thrown around easily so the training flight included a bunch of different approaches. I appreciated the effort they made on our behalf. Now to get the light on the prop to show it up nicely!
Boeing seems to have addressed a lot of the problems with the KC-46 Pegasus program (but not all of them yet) and so the Air Force is taking delivery of jets at a regular rate. Since plenty have been built, there are enough to deliver. I was at Paine Field a while back when one of the jets was heading out on a test flight. I ended up being there for both the departure and the arrival since the flight was not that long. The good summer light that Seattle gets but we don’t like people to know about meant I got some reasonable shots of it.
