P-3 hunting was part of the plan when Paul and I headed to NAS Whidbey Island. We had some success. There was a nice bit of icing on the cake for us. An EP-3E showed up too. The EP-3 has a nice selection of large radomes added to the airframe to cover the wide variety of sensors that this type has to fulfill its role of listening to transmissions around the world. I don’t know how long the EP-3 has once the P-3s are gone from fleet service so getting one was a definite plus.
The floatplane activity on Lake Union is fun to check out, not just for an aviation geek like me, but for plenty of visitors to the city too. I have previously gone down to the lakeshore to check them out but, one evening, while driving into the city to drop a friend off, I was coming down the road on the hill overlooking the lake when a plane took off giving an interesting alternative perspective on its departure. I figured this needed to be explored further.
The question was where to go. The road I had been on was not one on which stopping was practical. Parallel roads exist but there are buildings along most of them so the view is obscured. However, I did find a location that had a clear view of most of the lake (aside from one building that was right in the touchdown zone! I wasn’t around for much of the traffic but I did get to see a few arrivals and departures. Looking down on the flights and having some scenery behind them including the cityscape rather than the sky is a nice change. I may have to try this out again at a busier time.
A trip to Green Lake, a short distance from Whistler, was a chance to see the floatplane base. We had heard a few aircraft in the area so I was keen to see what was going on. We started out at the base where a Beaver and an Otter were both just getting ready to leave. I didn’t realize the direction of the wind so I didn’t make any effort to get out to the lake. I thought that they would be long gone. In fact, they taxied down the lake to take off back in our direction. I would have had plenty of time to get out to see the departure if I had left when they headed out.
Instead, I was walking through the trees when both planes took off. I got a couple of shots through the trees but missed the main opportunity. I understand that Whistler Air is a subsidiary of Harbour Air in Vancouver. They are clearly locally branded though. There was a bit more movement before we left with planes making their approach along the lake. They tended to land a little away from us but then keep up on the step as close in as possible to minimize taxi time. This meant they were still moving well as they got to us.
The floatplane activity of Kenmore Air is busy on Lake Union in Seattle. The end of the day means a lot of planes are moving from Lake Union back to the home base at Kenmore. It makes for a rush hour of planes coming back in good light. I wandered out to the pier at Log Boom Park which gives a great view of the incoming planes. Then I just waited. You know they are all going to be back before sundown so it is pretty predictable.
The inbound traffic is a combination of Otters and Beavers. De Havilland Canada’s finest show up further down the lake as they come across from Lake Union and then they head up the lake. On this occasion, the wind was from the north so they made straight in approaches, landed and continued straight in to the base. On another day I was there without a camera and the wind was a southerly. They then overflew the base and made a tight turn coming back onto the lake with the evening light on the nose. I will have to try and get that before too long!
A trip to Whidbey Island for me and Paul was aimed at seeing whatever we could get there on a random weekday. In truth, though, what we really wanted was P-3s. With the Orions rapidly being replaced by P-8s, they are getting harder to find and will soon be a memory. Consequently, our fingers were crossed for some of Lockheed’s aging subhunters. It turned out we were lucky.
It wasn’t a busy day for the turboprops but we did get to see a few. A departure early on meant we were pleased to have had some success. We also got arrival traffic later which certainly was pleasing. Our only disappointment was that one of the planes was operating with a rare canoe under the fuselage. We saw it in the distance (when the shots are horribly distorted by heat haze) but it was operating off a different runway from that which we were near, and we never were in the right place. However, we did get some of its buddies so a successful day out.
I made a stop at Vancouver International on my way to the city for a few days. It was the end of the day when I got there and I met up with my friend Mark who gave me a few pointers of what to look out for. The arrivals were in the opposite direction to that we had expected which messed up things a little but there were still options. Besides, I hadn’t shot there before so I was keen to see what was going on.
When you live near an airport, you can get blasé about what comes and goes. The same things every day can be a bit dull. For someone who has never been there before, though, all of this stuff is new and interesting. WestJet may be a familiar sight in Canada but I don’t see them very often. Dash 8s may be very old hat but they have largely vanished where, replaced by the Q400 derivative, so I am pleased to see them. It is this variety that makes somewhere new so interesting. These shots are some of the items that sparked my interest that day. Some more specific planes will get their own time on the blog in due course.
The subject of this post ended up getting some coverage but, when I saw it, I didn’t know about the interest surrounding it. I was at BFI awaiting the departure of another aircraft when a turboprop took off over me. I had the camera to hand so grabbed some shots of what I realized was an Airbus CN235. Painted in a dark gray scheme, it looked a little odd. A closer look at the shots showed it had a few lumps and bumps suggestive of an array of antennae. I figured it was just passing through en route to somewhere more interesting.
However, that wasn’t the case. It had been spotted flying some patterns over the city. I had seen some odd flight paths on Flightaware being flown by a plane called Spud21. I loved the name! it was flying orbits over the city but I couldn’t see anything else about it. However, when I saw the plane crop up in the media, the article identified that it was the owner of the Spud21 callsign.
I don’t know what the purpose of the flights was. It is suggested that the aircraft is owned by the US military but whether it is for their use or is in support of an overseas operator, whether these flights were for testing purposes or were checking out the residents I don’t know. I do know that it was something a little out of the ordinary though.
Every once in a while, when photographing a fast jet at transonic speeds, you might get something in the background that allows the diffraction caused by the formation of shockwaves to be visualized. I have posted about that here. I was in Vancouver and shooting the floatplanes taking off from the harbor (since it is a Canadian harbor, perhaps I should write harbour). As I was looking through the images zoomed in to check on sharpness, I realized that there was a visual effect of a similar nature. (If you think this is a Schlieren effect, it is not. That is a technique that involves a certain type of lighting to show the density differences but should not be applied to every time you see it in the wild.)
I don’t know whether what is showing up is the result of shocks forming on the props as they spin rapidly or just the tip vortices causing a similar effect. You can often see diffraction in trailing vortices. Whatever the reason, as you look above the aircraft at the patterns of structures on the shoreline beyond, you can clearly see some interesting effects. Since the props are spinning fast and there is an overlap of the wakes from each pass of a blade, the shapes are rather complex. Now I know that this is a thing, I might be tempted to take a longer lens and see what I can get in more detail of this interesting visual effect.
Standing in Gas Works Park, you have a view straight down Lake Union. At the other end of Lake Union is one of the bases for Kenmore Air. They operate floatplanes from there on a regular series of services as well as some sightseeing trips. We got there just as a bunch of planes took off in close succession and I was a bit annoyed to miss out the chance to get some shots of them. However, they are a busy company so we knew we would get some more flight before too long.
They start their takeoff run at the other end of the lake so they get airborne long before they reached us. With so much clutter in the background and a lot of ambient noise, you didn’t always immediately pick out that a departure was coming your way. Once they got airborne and a lot closer, they were easier to identify. They would turn before they reached us and head off en route. I could probably have spent a lot of time there watching the flights but Nancy is not quite so keen so we lingered a short while and then moved on.
This is the cruise ship that our family had been traveling on when they arrived in Vancouver. It was heading back out the same day and we watched it leave port and head out. As it was turning to head back to the open sea, one of the local Otter floatplanes was making its approach to land (or whatever the correct word is when it is water rather than land). It passed in front of the ship. Both vessels are comfortable in the water but one is on a rather different scale than the other.