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National Geographic/Icelandair 757

One weekend, I saw an early arrival of an Icelandair 757 was scheduled for Boeing Field. The weather was not looking great but it was an unusual arrival and I didn’t have any competing things top do so I went across. Icelandair has some charter aircraft and this one turned out to be one of those. I have shot the Abercrombie and Kent jet before. This is a high end tourist operation that takes people from exotic location to exotic location. On this occasion, it was something similar. This time the operation was National Geographic. When I saw the plane, I was quite surprised but not so much that I could grab a few shots!

Blue Angels Super Bugs Get To Seattle

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I was at Boeing Field for the arrival of the Blue Angels for Seafair. It was a work day so I was sitting in the car and actually presenting to some colleagues via a Teams call. My presentation was underway as they were getting close but it was almost done. I was hoping that it would all wrap up before they got there. Sadly, I was wrong. I was on the final section of the presentation when they flew overhead in Delta formation. I was shut in the car but still had to explain why it had suddenly got so loud at my end.

Fortunately, that was the end of the meeting and I was able to get out of the car in time for the arrival of the individual jets for landing. I did get to see the Delta arrival again later in the weekend but I am not sure whether it is my imagination or not but it seemed lower and closer on that first occasion when I was sitting in the car with no camera.

Plenty of Minis

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English Day at Exotics@RTC means there will be some Minis. I mean the original Minis – none of the BMW type (I say none but there might be a few although they aren’t getting prime spots). They take me back to my childhood as the car I learned to drive in. These examples are in better condition and are far better performers than our 850cc example was, but they still look much the same.

One of them had a wooden dash which reminded me of my friend Sam. She had a mini with a wooden dash and she put in in a place for some work and, when she got it back, the dash wears gone. They denied it had ever been there and she was absolutely gutted. If you are reading this Sam, I hope that isn’t too painful a memory. If you haven’t ever driven on old Mini, my memory of it was that they were like a go kart. I haven’t driven one for decades and wonder how they would seem after years of driving modern vehicles. I hope it would still be fun.

You Fly The Huey And I’ll Check My Texts

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After talking to someone that flew for the operator, I found myself checking through some older shots of the Olympic Air Show with the Hueys doing flight demonstrations. As I scrolled through the shots, I saw that, of the two crew, one was busy flying the helicopter and the other was playing with their phone. I imagine that they were filming the display but I preferred the idea that the whole thing was too boring and they were just checking out messages instead.

Sapsucker Got A Lot Of Attention

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While I am wandering around Juanita Bay park, I meet plenty of people that are very knowledgeable about birds. I am not so I tend to follow what others are looking at and shooting. I came across a woman starting up a tree at a bird that she informed me was a sapsucker. She could have been telling me a tale for all I know. It was at an awkward angle but I tried to get some shots of it anyway. When I came back, she was gone but it was still there. It had moved to a slightly more convenient angle for a photo but not by much. For you twitchers out there, is this a sapsucker?

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.

English Day at Exotics@RTC

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I didn’t get to Exotics@RTC this year as much as I would have liked. Sometimes the weather conspired against them and sometimes I couldn’t make it anyway. I did mange to make some of the special days, though, and one of these was the English Day. This tends to have more of a vintage feel to it than some of the other special days. Yes, there are plenty of McLarens and Aston Martins but a lot of older stuff to mix it up a bit.

You get the Bentleys and Rolls (not sure how well they qualify as English anymore) and there are Jags all over the place but there are plenty of less common types and definitely a few of the ones that probably keep mechanics busy. You have no idea how many jokes about Lucas electrical systems you can hear in the space of an hour. Aside from these shots, I also took a little video to share with my sister on the day and have edited that down a bit to include below.

Shells, Shells and More Shells

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The beach in Eastsound seems to be made up heavily of shells. Walking across it felt like a very destructive act as the shells crunched under foot. I don’t recall ever being somewhere that was made up of so much shell material. It looked very attractive but I didn’t like the breakage that came with it!

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.