My luck with KC-46s and bad weather broke recently with a Pegasus launching out of Boeing Field on a glorious day. It was carrying out trials work with a US Navy Hornet. This jet was the subject of its own post. The KC-46 followed it down the runway. It rotated in a good location and the light was so much nicer than I have had recently so I was very happy to get shots of it as it climbed out and headed off to the airspace set aside for testing.
Every once in a while, you just get lucky. I happened to be at Boeing Field on a sunny day with operations in a southerly direction and a bunch of cool traffic. Most of the traffic shows up on Flightaware so you have a clue it might be flying but my recent experiences have been that the P-8 test flights have not been listed. Consequently, I was a little surprised when a P-8 pulled out of Boeing’s military operations ramp and taxied for departure. It came right past me as it made its way to the departure end. A short while later it rolled.
The sun was out, the light was nice, they rotated at a good location to get some nice shots and then, as they climbed out, the clouds were really nice providing a mottled sort of background. The colors looked great behind the grey jet. What a great combination!
When the weather starts to turn, you can assume that whatever you are waiting for is likely to show up just after it gets bad. In this case, a KC-46 Pegasus was on its way back to Boeing Field and the clouds were rolling in. Things were getting darker and it looked like the clouds would open. Meanwhile, the KC-46 was still a distance away.
Sure enough, the skies opened. By the time the jet was on final approach, the light had disappeared and the rain was belting down. I got some shots of it but, even with a bunch of exposure compensation, the jet was more of a silhouette than anything else. A little post processing help brought out the detail but this was not an ideal shooting situation. A dark grey jet in dying light is just what you want!
I saw something online about people building houses in unusual spaces. Sometimes this was because that was all the space that they had available. Other times they did it to spite someone who had the adjacent property. One of them turned out to be in Seattle so I decided to check it out when we were over there running some other errands. It is located in Montlake.
The house is a wedge shape. If you look at it from the main road, it looks like a relatively normal frontage. Nothing too special. From the wide end, it seems like a single room width property. There is a garage underneath and rooms above. Go to the other end, though, and you see just how much it narrows down. There is space for a door and that is about it. A trip to Google Maps will show you the footprint of the house and you can see how it has been squeezed in. A weird place for sure but apparently a popular house to own judging by the price it has sold for in the past!
If you think of aerial refueling tankers, the Boeing 747 is not going to be the first plane that jumps to mind. However, a tanker version of the 747 was developed and is in service to this day in Iran. I haven’t seen one of those planes but, before they were built, Boeing undertook testing of the configuration on their testbed, the original 747 prototype. This is on display at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. When we were walking through the fuselage, we got to the read and found the boomer station. Apparently, it was not removed after installation. It looks remarkably similar to that from a KC-135 so I guess they ported the design across rather than come up with something significantly different.
Sometimes you are just in the wrong place when the conditions are right. We were driving across the floating bridge that takes SR520 between Seattle and Bellevue one evening. The sun was going down and the sky to the north was pink. The water of Lake Washington was smooth and was reflecting the sky beautifully. We were in a car doing 60mph so there was nothing to be done about it. Once across the bridge, I avoided the freeway and took Lake Washington Blvd towards home. It runs alongside the lake and, while a slower road, it is a shorter distance and a more pleasant drive.
As we got alongside the water, the sky was still looking rather impressive. The pink to the north had faded but the sky to the west still looked great. There is a park along the shoreline and I zipped in there to see if I could find a parking spot. Sure enough, someone had just left so I hopped out and took a few shots before the whole thing was done. The orange in the sky towards downtown Seattle was very intense and it all looked great. I guess I got a second bite of the apple.
For the people that don’t care for my aviation posts, this one won’t be of interest. For the aviation fans that don’t care about the techie stuff, this will also be of limited interest. That probably leaves a very small group of readers by now (Gary, I am trusting you are still here). This is about a piece of flight test instrumentation that often causes questions when people see it. It is the trailing static cone.
The aircraft has sensors that measure air data, two of the most important of which are the pitot probe and the static port. The pitot probe measures the dynamic pressure of the air which increases as the speed increases. The static port measures the air around the aircraft. The difference between the two is used to determine the speed of the aircraft and the static is used to determine the altitude. These are both vital information for a pilot. However, the aircraft affects the flow of the air around it so, while you can calculate what the pressures should be, you need to validate what the actual readings are. The first flights are carried out prior to calibrating the system so you need to have a bit of margin in the speeds you use until you have confidence in the readings.
Measuring static pressure is hard to do. The plane will have a static port on the skin of the plane as well as possibly incorporated with the pitot head. However, the air has accelerated to go around the fuselage so it is assumed to have a lower pressure than ambient. Because the plane is disturbing the flow, you need a way to measure the pressure some distance away from the plane. The answer is a trailing static cone.
This cone incorporates pressure measurement sensors and it attached to a long cable. This is held on a reel inside the aircraft and fed out of the aircraft at the rear. For airliners, this is usually through a modification to the top of the fin. A comparison between the test aircraft and a production jet will show the different structure. The cable dangles out of the fin and, as the speed increases, the cone pulls the cable taught and streams backwards.
When the testing is required, the cable is winched out and the cone is a long way behind the aircraft in what is relatively undisturbed airflow. If you go to the Museum of Flight, the prototype 747 is on display and it includes the trailing cone equipment in the fuselage. The reel is shown in its mounting location and the trailing cone is hung inside to allow you to take a look at it.
Not long ago, I posted about seeing an Avanti for the first time in a while. The lack of Avantis having been broken, I have seen a couple more. I saw that one had come in to Boeing Field and I was there before it fired up for its next flight. It taxied out on the opposite side of the field and then took off to the northeast.
A short while later, I saw a silhouette of a plane on approach and looked closer to see what it was. It looked pretty like an Avanti so I figured it was the same aircraft returning for some reason. I was a bit bothered that something might be wrong but happy to get another chance to shoot it. As it got closer thought, it was clearly not in the same paint scheme. Instead, it turned out to be a Canadian registered example and a pretty nice looking one at that.
Getting two Avantis within a short space of time was an outcome I was pretty pleased with. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hang around to get the departure of the second example.
New locomotives are not the only new vehicles to have shown up in Seattle. Sound Transit runs the Sounder commuter rail service in the area and they have been taking delivery of new cab cars. These are built by Bombardier, as were the previous cab cars. However, this is a new design that incorporates crash energy management technology. As a result, they have done away with the passenger gangway on the front of the vehicle and provided a full width cab for the engineer. It provides a slightly more elegant front end to the vehicle than the previous design.
Substitutions on the Seattle route are not just limited to Lufthansa. Virgin Atlantic has been flying the route with the 787-9 but, as with a lot of the Rolls Dreamliner operators, Virgin has been suffering from engine shortages while the blade cracking problems are dealt with. They have brought the A340-600 on to the route in the interim. I thought I wouldn’t be seeing these again after the last examples at SFO I saw but I got another chance. Not great light but it was good to see one more time.
