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Working Bell 407

I was heading back to the airport in Tucson to catch my flight when I came upon a Bell 407 doing some long line work with a person on the end of the line. Normally this sort of thing happens when you are nowhere close to a convenient place to stop. However, this time I was in luck. A turning was coming up and it had a great place off the road to stop. Consequently, I got to spend a bit of time watching the team training.

They were from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. I have no idea what that is and as a dodgy foreigner, I wasn’t going to ask. They were lifting a guy from the ground, holding him for a while and then depositing him back on the ground. They also landed briefly during the time I was there. I did have a flight to catch so I couldn’t hang around for too long but I was able to get a few shots of them at work before it was time to take the car back.

Since they weren’t too far away, I was able to use the 70-200mm. That also gave me some flexibility for playing with low shutter speeds. As I do in these cases when I have the time, I ramp the speed lower and lower. That way I figure I will get some sharp ones and then gradually increase the failure rate until nothing comes out sharp or, as is the case on a sunny day in the Arizona summer, I run out of apertures to slow the shutter speed any further. In this case, I had good luck throughout the range and was able to get some really nice discs for the rotors.

Marine Week

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En route from a day with a client to the airport I had a spare hour to pay a visit to Boeing Field in Seattle. I figured that my time window would mean there was nothing much to see and I didn’t have anything longer than the 24-105 with me anyway. However, when I got there I could see an interesting collection of USMC machines on the opposite side of the field and the Blue Angels were parked up near the Museum of Flight.

I took a ride around to where the Marine helicopters and V-22 were parked and got chatting to one of the crews. He explained it was the start of Marine Week and offered a chance to walk around the ramp with one of the crew. I was not going to refuse that. Mario kindly showed me around and let me shoot anything external. They had three UH-1Y Venoms and three AH-1Z Cobras along with a single V-22. One fof the Cobras was marked up in special squadron colors. I took a walk around all of them and grabbed a few shots while chatting with Mario about what it was like to support these machines. He had worked on the UH-1N before converting to the Venom so he had some interesting perspectives on the relative reliability of the two.

These machines were going to be progressively moved across to the other side of the field as part of the public displays for Marine Week and the first of the Cobras actually was towed while I was there so my timing was excellent. However I did have to go and then my timing let me down as, while I was driving away, I saw an AV-8B Harrier II coming down the approach. Oh well. I still did better than I had expected.

Coast Guard Bell 47

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I always seem to find something aviation related when I am out and about. San Ramon is the next town up from us and it was having its Art and Wind event. This combined a bunch of art stalls with some excellent kite flying displays and was an amusing play on the more common Art and Wine festivals that many towns around here have. As we wandered around, we came across a Bell 47 helicopter. They are not terribly rare but this one was a bit more interesting as it was in service with the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

I had no idea that Bell 47s were still in government service. The crew were standing by and talking to a selection of kids that came to have a look. Our timing couldn’t have been better because just after we arrived, they starting moving people away so that they could take off. It would have been rude to leave at this point so we sat down close by and watched them start up and depart the field after a brief moment turned towards us to say goodbye. Nice!