Northwest Flying Photography Blog

So it was a warm, but not particularly pretty day last Monday in the great state of Washington when Mr. “BB Gun” and I decided to take a short flight in the 1977 Cessna 172 that Snohomish Flying Service had agreed to rent me. A high pressure front was moving in and pushing clouds out of the way, but not in time for take off. To make matters worse, I had forgotten my charts and AFD at home, so I had no frequencies for some of the more interesting airports and had to stay in the area where I know the advisory Freqs. Which just happened to be on the edge between the two fronts. So it was a bit bumpy flying, but not the worst I’ve had.

Fortunately I was able to convince BB to do most of the flying, he did well, but it worries me when people don’t question my instructions to “just fly toward that mountain.”

We took off from S43 and headed up to KAWO for a set of touch-and-goes. Which I executed flawlessly I might add, even after that bastard in the Twin Navion called that he was on his crosswind when he was turning base. After that it was a flight along the east side of I-5 (staying out of Whidbey’s airspace) to north of KBVS for a quick demonstration of a steep turn, a 0-G pushover and some slow flight. We then returned the aircraft to S43. A nice way to spend 1.4 hours.

The only Pix I got were a couple of shots of a tigermoth:

and:

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This time in a Cub!
Daryl Hickman and Bob Holt are flying Daryl’s ‘new’ 1940 Piper J-5A from New York to Auburn Wa.

You can track their progress here: http://www.cubflying.com/

Yet another flight I wish I could take…maybe not in a Cub…

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On this day in 1953, Jackie Cochran became the first woman to fly fast than the speed of sound.
Ms. Cochran was by any standards a great pilot. That she has never reach the “celebraty” status of Amelia Earhart is a damn shame.  For a long time she held the prestigious tile of “fastest woman alive” being the first woman to break mach 2.

Ms. Cochran’s accomplishments were not only due to her gender, she was the first pilot to make a blind instrument landing and she still holds more speed and distance records than any pilot in history.
She was instrumental is starting the WAC during WWII, and later lead the training of the WASPs. 
Ms. Cochran died on 1980, but her legacy lives on, and to paraphrase Hal:
Cochran is Gaelic for “a better pilot than you”.

Of other note, today in 1980, Mt St. Helens decided to blow its head clean off. I was about 20 miles away from this event, but I was sleeping and did not wake up for the explosion. They tell me it was loud.

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Skagit is a place, and a week (and some odd days) ago it was also a time. Well, it is still a place and time, but the time now is not the time it was. The place is the same… Mostly… In a relativistic sort of way.

With out going into physics, I’ll simply say that on the 28th of April, The Skagit tulip festival fly-in and air show took place at the  Skagit Regional Airport. Why do you care? You care because I was there with some nifty camera equipment and I took pictures. Lots of pictures. Over 700 pictures. Of those 700+ pictures, some 50 made the cut and were added to the gallery, giving me a signal to noise ration of about 7%. Now to be absolutely fair, some very good pictures were added to my Flickr site, and if I calculated them in the equation I would bump up the percentage a little, but the photos I add to flickr are really not the cream of the crop, so we’ll just leave it at 7%.

The air show itself was fun, my personal favorite performers, the Granleys were there and the Navy sent their F-18 west coast demo team to do a bunch of fly-bys.  The Cascade warbirds were also in attendance and did a bunch of fly-bys.  Also there were a couple of aircraft from the Port Townsend Aero Museum. 

In addition to the airshow, the fly-in part of the day looked to be a fine turn out. Unfortunately, I drove in rather than renting for an entire day. One of these days…

Check out the Gallery
And Flicker

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