Tag Archives: storage

Chino Backlot

The Planes of Fame museum at Chino is a fantastic place to visit for any aviation enthusiast. Many hangars are open and they are filled with all sorts of interesting aircraft, restored either to static or flying condition. However, they are not all that is there. There is a backlot in which other aircraft are stored awaiting either their own restoration or for them to provide parts for the restoration of something else. Some great looking vintage aircraft here including jets that it would be so good to see back in the air. I decided to dedicate this post to some shots of these less glamorous residents.

State of the Pegasus Fleet

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January 2019 brought a milestone for the USAF. They accepted their first KC-46 Pegasus. Admittedly they accepted it with a number of deferred issues that Boeing has been given a few years to resolve but that are Category 1 deficiencies. I guess this should mean we will see a lot of deliveries in the coming weeks and months.

The backlog of jets parked up is substantial. There are jets parked at Boeing Field on both the military ramp and the flight test ramp. There are more scattered around the Boeing ramp at Everett. More of them are in the conversion area at the south end of Paine Field. More still are parked up across the cross runway. It’s a lot of jets and, if you are an accountant, this is a level of Work In Progress that must make you squirm. We should see them start to head on their way before too long.

Building But Not Delivering – The KC-46 Story

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The tale of the USAF’s quest for a new refueling tanker has been long and drawn out. People went to jail, awards were made and overturned. None of that matters now. The contract is with Boeing to produce a variant of the 767 as the KC-46 Pegasus. The program has not been smooth. Technical and production issues have caused delays. The in service date has slipped and Boeing has incurred a lot of overruns.

While all of this has been going on, the production process has not stopped. Consequently, while testing still continues, there are production airframes coming off the line. If you go to Boeing Field, there are a bunch of test airframes on the flight line. If you go to Paine Field, there are a bunch more that remain to be finished. It appears that Boeing is building the airframes, sealing them up, not fitting high value items like engines, and parking them wherever there is space. A few years ago, Paine Field was covered in undelivered 787s. Now it is as if time has turned back because the Dreamliner’s predecessor is the type parked all over the place.

Demise of a NAS

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Moving house means packing up your stuff and hoping it all survives the journey. Some things you have are not ones you are happy about leaving out of your control so you take them with you. Since we were driving up, we had a bit of flexibility about what we could take with us. Aside from the camera gear, I brought my two NAS devices. These have the backups of all of my stuff so, while the computer went in the truck, I had the backups. However, when we got to the new place, one of the NAS units wouldn’t fire up.

This rather defeated the purpose of taking my backups with me. The reason I have two units is that the one I have had the longest is limited in the size of drives it can handle. 2Tb drives are the largest so, as it was getting full, I bought a new unit. Originally I had planned to just use it but, instead, I kept the one going and added new data to the new unit to avoid having to buy larger drives up front.

I figured at some point I might want to retire the old NAS. It was far noisier than the new one and was probably over ten years old. It seems to have made the decision for me.

Now I was in a worrying position. The newer unit didn’t have enough capacity for all of the data. However, it could handle most of it. I immediately backed up what I could. Meanwhile, I ordered new drives to expand it. The price of drives has dropped dramatically so the 3Tb units are being replaced by 8Tb items. That should provide plenty of capacity for a long time! As the drives get swapped out sequentially and the NAS rebuilds and syncs everything, I gradually got extra capacity and set up the full back up process. Now I am back to normal. It does make me wonder about the life cycle of a NAS though. (As an aside, I do have a tertiary backup of the images to BluRay so, while some elements were vulnerable for a while, the majority did have a fallback option.)

Backup Strategy for the Blog Has Changed

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Since I first started the blog using WordPress, I have been looking for something sensible for backing up the blog data. I can use FileZilla to copy off everything on the blog periodically but that is a process that requires me to do something on a regular basis and it isn’t very convenient. I had set up a plugin that was supposed to back up everything to a Dropbox account but I was never successful in getting too much of it to actually backup properly. It always seemed to be stalled. Consequently, I was concerned that I was vulnerable to a data loss. Given how much effort goes into the backup strategy for my photos and documents, having the blog relatively unprotected didn’t seem to make much sense.

Then I came across an alternative approach. This uses a plugin called UpdraftPlus. I read a detailed article online about how to use this plugin to back up to a Google Drive account. Since I already have one of those that doesn’t currently get used for anything else, I was interested. The base account I have comes with 15 GB of storage so that seemed like plenty to cover what I needed. The full article on how to set everything up is at https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-backup-your-wordpress-site-to-google-drive/ if you want to check it out. It is not the simplest process and the interface appears to have been tweaked since it was written but I got to where I needed to be and have everything setup now. It backs up on a daily basis so I now have a couple of previous backups at any one time should they be needed. If you are wondering about backup strategies yourself, maybe this will be a useful approach to consider.

AMARG

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The storage facility at Davis Monthan AFB in Tucson AZ is very famous. The storage of so many airframes that are either gradually being broken down for parts or that have the potential to make it back into service is well known and has been the subject of many books and articles. Getting access to the facility is a bit harder than it used to be but there is a tour that is run each day from the Pima Air and Space Museum across the road from the base.

The tour is on a bus that doesn’t allow anyone off so it is not ideal either from a photography perspective or from the point of view of exploring the more unusual aircraft. However, it is a simple thing to do so making the trip on the bus was the option I went with when I was there a few years ago. The bus had tinted windows which affect the photos quite a bit and you are stuck on one side of the bus so anything on the opposite side is a case of seeing what luck you have shooting across the bus. Reflections are a constant problem of course.

The storage facility is exactly as you imagine it would be. The lines of aircraft of the same type are very cool. It really doesn’t matter what the type is. Seeing so many of one type together, often with a wide variety of unit markings, is impressive. The big types like the C-5, the C-141 and the B-1B dominate their areas. The smaller types can be scattered in amongst them. Some look rather forlorn, often without the gear any more, mounted on wooden frames. Other locations have parts stacked up. A selection of wings from A-10s were stacked in a row. At some point I need to make the plan to visit and investigate the facility in a lot more detail.

Roll Out the Barrel

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Nancy and I were up in Healdsburg as part of a weekend away. She wanted to check out a winery called Ferrari-Carano while we were up there so we headed off to find it. It turned out to be a very attractive location. The buildings were beautifully designed and the grounds had been expertly landscaped. Even if you didn’t want any wine, it was a nice place to walk around for a while.

We were interested in the wine too so went in to buy some of their stock. I took a wander down to the basement where you could see a healthy selection of barrels of wine being stored. Sadly, this area was off limits so I had to be content with looking through the glass at the stockpiles. There was enough wine down there to keep me happy for a while. It would be fun to have a closer look around. Maybe they have tours that we can go back for. If not, at least we can buy more of their excellent wines!

Updated Approach to Lightroom Catalogs

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I have been a user of Lightroom since Adobe release version 1 quite a few years ago. It has been a very useful tool for me and something that dominates my workflow. In the early days, there were issues with the number of images that a catalog could have before it started to respond sluggishly. Consequently, I created a series of different catalogs for different subject areas. Military aircraft were in one, civil in another, wildlife in a third, sports in a fourth and so on. This system was fine to use although it had a few minor drawbacks in that some images would be in more the one catalog. I would import them to one and then export them to the other. However, as I edited one version, the other one did not always keep up despite saving the sidecar files to disc.

At some point, Adobe updated the functionality of the application and it was no longer so constrained by the number of files in a catalog. However, I had a series of catalogs that I was familiar with so I didn’t pay much attention to this change. However, over time, it occurred to me that I was making my life more complex than it needed to be. I could probably cut down the number of catalogs dramatically and make the workflow a bit simpler.

I decided to have one catalog for all of my aviation related imagery and the other for everything else. To do so, I created a new catalog for each of these and started importing from the other catalogs. This was not as smooth a process as you might have imagined. There were duplicate images as I knew and you could set the system up to make these virtual copies so nothing got lost along the way. However, sometimes the import did not go well. They were large catalogs coming into an even larger catalog and this caused some struggles. I had to delete and start again at some points but ultimately I got it to work. I did have to recreate some of the collections which did not transfer so easily in some cases but it is now done.

Did it make life easier? Yes, it did. Having just two catalogs is now a lot more straightforward. Do they run just as well? No. The aviation catalog does seem to be a bit sluggish sometimes. Usually it works fine but it is definitely not as responsive as the individual ones were. I shall see how this develops over time. A new machine is in the works so whether that will make a difference or not, we shall see.

Dreamliner Storage

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A recent trip to the Pacific Northwest recently included a free afternoon in which I had a chance to do some exploring. When I first new I was going to be in the area for a couple of hours, I wondered what to do. I was thinking about shooting at Boeing Field or Everett. Everett can have some interesting moves but can also have absolutely nothing happening. Boeing Field can be the same of course. I was still pondering this when on the flight across and then it occurred to me that Everett had some other things I had been meaning to do for a while other than hope for wide-body moves from the Boeing plant.

Paine Field (to give it its proper name) is home to a number of vintage aircraft collections. I shall describe more exploration of them in upcoming posts. However, as an appetizer, I shall mention something that does involve Boeing wide-bodies. The 787 parking lot! I knew that Boeing had produced a bunch of 787 airframes while they were still dealing with the design and production issues and that these were stored awaiting rework for delivery. I had even seem some pictures. However, I guess I had not really thought about it until I got there.

Paine Field is covered in Dreamliners! They are everywhere. Every time you go to a different part of the field, you come across 787s parked up. Some are in areas being worked on prior to delivery. Others are sitting on spare ramp space awaiting their turn in the rework process. Some can be identified either because they are fully painted or parts of them are that allow you to work out where they will go. Others are just white and who knows what awaits them. They have large weights attached to the engine pylons to keep them balanced without forking out huge amounts of cash for the engines. If you are of an accounting bent, you will still marvel at the amount of cash tied up in these airframes that will not be cleared out for at least 18 months. No engines reduces this a bit but they are still expensive things to have lying around. Boeing ran out of their own space so they are renting space from the airport for all of this parking. I guess the airport is happy to have a bunch of cash coming in without having to suffer too much inconvenience!

If you are anywhere near Everett in the coming months, do at least pass by to see just how much is there. Of course there are plenty of new jets being readied for delivery too but that just makes it look even more amazing!

More Tucson Exploration

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While the majority of my time at Tucson International was spent chasing F-16s, there is a lot more going on at the airfield. This part of the world is popular for aircraft storage as a result of the dry conditions that don’t encourage corrosion. The reason that Davis Monthan AFB has the boneyard is because of this and Marana is just up the road and also stores lots of aircraft.

Tucson seems to have a few things stored but there seems to be more of a focus on reworking aircraft that have left an operator or breaking down planes for parts. Over on the southwest side of the field seem to be a bunch of planes so I drove over to take a look and see what I could find.

There are quite a few aircraft in various states over there. A bunch of ex-Southwest 737s seemed to be going through the process of rework. Whether they are going back to the fleet or heading off to pastures new I don’t know. I also came across the fuselage of an MD-80 which appears to have been part of a U2 tour prior to its demise. I particularly liked an L-1011 TriStar that was on one ramp. I assumed it was disused but it does appear to be in better shape than something that hasn’t flown for a long time. Who knows. They are a rare beast these days so let’s hope it is still flying occasionally.