Tag Archives: airplane

The F-16XL That Most People Ignored

There was a grey camo F-16 on the ramp at the air show at Edwards this year. When I saw it I was really excited but I think I was in the minority. I mentioned to a photographer next to me how cool it was and he commented on the air data boom. I told him it was an F-16XL and he had no idea what that was. The XL was the long range strike version of the F-16 that went up against and lost to the F-15E Strike Eagle. Two jets were built and they ended up having some test duties including so work for NASA. The single seater was the jet on the ramp for the show.

It has a large cranked delta wing but, from a normal viewpoint, that can be seen but isn’t obvious. A look at the shadows, though, and you know what you are dealing with. The airframe is an early fiscal number – the next jet became the AFTI aircraft – and the rear fuselage has the mounting points for an anti-spin chute rig. This jet has done a lot in its flying days but it is now a museum piece.

Fat Albert Arrives First

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Seafair means a lot of aircraft coming to Boeing Field. The Blue Angels are always the feature part of the show and this was going to be my first chance to see their new aircraft. Yes, they have replaced the Hornets with Super Hornets and I shall cover that separately but they have also replaced Fat Albert since last I saw them. The C-130T has been replaced with a C-130J that was sold to them by the Royal Air Force. It has a new paint scheme to complement this change of era.

I was at Boeing Field for the arrival of the Blues and the jets were preceded by the arrival of Albert. The good thing is that it is tractable on ADSB so I knew it was going to arrive and when. Of course, a Herc coming down the approach is not as dramatic as a bunch of Super Bugs blasting over in formation but it is still good. I did manage to catch it again in the coming days as part of the display so had more than one chance to get some shots.

Return of the G-III On A Sunny Sunday Morning

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A G-III is going to be of interest but when it comes on a Sunday morning when the sun is out and conditions look nice, I am going to try and be there. This was the One Flight jet which I had seen before but I wasn’t going to pass it up because of that given how good the conditions were. I got there in time to see it land and it parked up on the ramp a little north of me although not easy to get a shot of. It wasn’t staying for long so I was able to catch it taxiing back out for departure and then taking off too. Not a bad result for a start to a Sunday morning.

Preserved Defender

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My visit to the Army Flying Museum made reference to some of the exhibits having their own posts and this is one such post. As part of the recent refurbishment, they added a Britten Norman Defender to the collection. This was recently retired from service and was refurbished for display. Having grown up on the Isle of Wight, the Britten Norman Islander is a plane that I have a soft spot for. The Defender is the militarized version of the Islander and it has served in numerous roles around the world from the basic transport role to surveillance of those that don’t want to be seen.

This one is mounted in a dynamic pose which rather dominates the first display hangar. Things are rather tight in the space and definitely dark so trying to get some shots of it that I wanted was a little challenging. I did shot some panos to try and get more of it in than my lens would normally allow. There is a balcony around the upper level of the hangar and that provides a good vantage point on the Defender too. I was happy to get as much as I could of the airframe since I have had very few encounters with them while they were in service.

Not Often You Get To See A 747 These Days

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Passenger 747s are few and far between these days but the freighter world still has plenty of them. Even so, seeing a 747 is coming in is a nice addition to an afternoon. Heathrow’s arrivals included a Cathay Pacific Cargo 747-8F which was a nice bonus. I haven’t had much luck with the Cathay 747-8Fs over the years so was looking forward to it showing up. I had positioned a lot closer to the approach path when it came in and I wondered whether I might have too much lens since the 8F is the longest variant. Fortunately, it all worked out just fine and the sun played ball too.

P1A Tucked In The Back

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The Boscombe collection has a couple of interesting testbed airframes. The Avro 707 was in a previous post but another fine jet is the English Electric P1A. The precursor to what was to become the Lightning, the P1A is very similar in some respects but quite different in others. The nose is a pitot inlet without the shock cone that the Lightning adopted to house its radar. The rest of the front fuselage has quite a different shape while it also feels lower to the ground than the Lightning was. It is nice that a Lightning front fuselage is displayed alongside it for comparison.

The A380s Aren’t Dead After All

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Aviation enthusiasts are an odd bunch. They love aviation but they can really hate certain types. The emotions can really run high and no type exemplifies this more than the A380. The project hasn’t been a success by modern standards and production has now ended. This provides much glee for some people for some reason. I’m not sure why they feel the lack of success for a plane makes their life better but whatever.

I have flown on the A380 a couple of times and it was a great experience. I always like seeing them. Variety is sadly lacking in modern aviation and anything different is welcome as far as I am concerned. The onset of the pandemic resulted in many airlines parking all sorts of types and the A380s were clearly a target. If there are no passengers, the largest capacity jet is not going to be helpful. The death of the A380 was widely proclaimed. However, it turns out that this was a bit premature.

A few airlines have been reinstating their fleets and more are coming back out of storage. British Airways has their fleet back in action. Emirates is using theirs heavily. At Heathrow, I also saw Qatar and Qantas using theirs again. (Qatar might be more related to their spat with Airbus over A350s and the need for any capacity they can get.) It is good news that they are still around. We shall see what the future brings for some of the other jets that are still stored.

Lufthansa NEOs

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Lufthansa was a launch customer for the A320neo and took delivery of some of the earliest airframes. They now have an extensive fleet of the jets and they seem to be flying in to Heathrow very frequently. I ended up shooting a bunch of their jets in my brief excursion. I am not a big fan of their newest livery but, while it looks dull on the bigger jets, I actually feel like it suits the A320 a little better.

Specials Coming to London

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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.

Cirrus and Grand Caravan Getting In Each Other’s Way

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Boeing Field is constantly operating from both runways at the same time. The light aircraft traffic on the short runway can co-exist with whatever is underway on the main, long runway. However, despite the clear ATC instructions, there are occasional when things don’t quite go to plan. We had a Cirrus and a Grand caravan on approach to the parallel runways. I am not certain who was at fault, but from my angle, it appeared that the Cirrus was drifting off towards the wrong runway. It corrected its path but not before the pilot of the Grand Caravan decided that things were not looking good and went around. It didn’t take them long to get back around the pattern and the second approach was incident free. I don’t know whether the controllers ended up talking to either crew or not.