The Little Cessna That Could
A few days ago, I pulled my SD card out of my camera for the first time in over a month. I haven’t had the opportunity to take the camera anywhere but my back yard for several weeks, much less time to edit any photos (or actually write the second part to my prior blog post about chasing the steam trains on the TVRM). Consequently, the photos I’ve taken lately that are worth even editing have been mainly aircraft photos.
About two miles to the east of my house is our town’s local airport, Portland Municipal (ICAO code is 1M5 for any other aviation nerds or pilots out there). The downwind leg most pilots use when they utilize the north facing runway takes them directly over my house, giving me plenty of opportunities to play with proper shutter speed, aperture, and focus technique.
Going through all the photos I dumped onto my computer the other night, I selected the photos that seemed to turn out the best of three different single-engine general aviation aircraft: a Beechcraft Bonanza, Piper Cherokee, and a Cessna 172. All three photos were clear enough that I could read the N-registration number on each aircraft.
I enjoy looking up thr registration numbers numbers on the FAA website, just to see little details like the home base it is registered at, if it’s a private owner, flying club, or a business that owns it, year of manufacture, and so on. The photos I captured of the Cessna 172 were particularly intriguing.
This C172 has a straight tail and a full-height rear fuselage, which limits it to the first few years the 172 was manufactured. The venerable 172 was first flown in 1955, with the first year of manufacturing being of the 1956 model year. Looking up the FAA registration information for N7367A, I found a fascinating detail.
This particular 172 was manufactured that very first year of production. Here we are, sixty-two years later, and the plane is still flying strong. Who knows, perhaps we will see this 172 still airworthy in another sixty years.
Another shot of N7367A, with the straight vertical stabilizer and rudder more obvious.
Another recent photo, Piper Cherokee N1126H, based out of Portland Muni.
An Industrial Wonderland Of Steam
Recently, my wife took a week-long trip to Colorado to surprise one of her sisters. The weekend she was gone, I decided that I would take the opportunity to take a photography trip. The only problem was deciding where to go. Several options were on the table, mainly various state parks across central Tennessee, southern Indiana, and central Kentucky. Ultimately, a post by the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum in Chattanooga, TN made up my mind.
As it turned out, TVRM’s ex-Southern Railroad star, no. 4501 would be making her maiden trip of 2018 to Summerville, GA the very weekend my wife was in Colorado. Having ridden behind 4501 twice with my wife, I knew there were plenty of opportunities to capture some good shots of 4501 along the route. I went to work doing what research I could using Google Earth to find some potential spots along the route that might yield some good images. I found various scenes, from the Missionary Ridge Tunnel, an industrial area near the Norfolk Southern yard, the trestle in Trion, GA, and various scenes in between.
The morning of Saturday March 3, 2018, I departed my house at 5:30 in the morning. With my residence being in central time zone, and 4501 departing the station in Chattanooga at 9:00 eastern, I had to waste no time in order to get to the first location. The trip was fairly uneventful, and having dealt with the craziness of Interstate 24 plenty of times behind the wheel of a tractor trailer, the lightness of early morning Saturday traffic was a welcome change.
I arrived in Chattanooga, and made my way to the industrial park I had selected. Here, the TVRM tracks interchange with Norfolk Southern’s rails. A couple hundred feet down from that junction, another junction leads to the Chattanooga & Chickamauga Railroad’s tracks which lead south to Summerville, GA. Thus, at this industrial area, 4501 stops, first to request clearance from NS to access their rails, and secondly to pick up the C&C pilot, a crewman from the C&CRR who has to be aboard the locomotive while traveling on C&C property. As a result, there would be several minutes that 4501 was stopped, giving me opportunity with a few close up shots to play around with.
I set up my camera at around 9:10AM, ten minutes after 4501’s scheduled departure time. The location was roughly thirty minutes by rail from the museum’s station, so I had plenty of time to shoot test shots and prepare. When I arrived, I was alone, but within five minutes, a small group of foamers—the name given to people who “foam at the mouth” over steam locomotives—had assembled around me. All had entry-level Canon and Nikon DSLRs (like my Canon T6) around their necks and small camcorders on tripods. I felt a bit strange having my still camera on my tripod, but the second 4501’s whistle was heard in the distance, excitement overtook all other feelings as I went to work finalizing my composition, checking my focus, and double, triple, and quadruple checking the scene. The sky was cloudless, and the light was quickly becoming harsh, and I wasn’t sure how the photographs would turn out.
Fortunately, as 4501 rounded the corner into view, everything came together perfectly. The image I had in mind was with 4501’s stack being directly underneath the enclosed gantry over the tracks. Here, I’d noticed how the hot steam exhaust from the stack would condense into thick white clouds as it got trapped under the gantry. It was always so fascinating to me, and I wanted to capture the scene from a different perspective from that as a passenger.
As 4501 came to a stop in front of me, I had a few minutes to play with some long exposures using a neutral-density filter. Ultimately, these didn’t turn out, but two of my other handheld shots did. The first seemed to be overexposed, but fortunately I was able to recover the blown-out highlights and get an image that I was quite happy with.
The second shot I got just as 4501 started to roll. After sitting for several minutes, unused steam in the cylinders condenses to liquid water, which will not compress. If the engineer were to simply open the throttle to admit steam into the cylinders, the hydraulic pressure will rip the cylinder heads from their mounts. Thus, standard procedure is to open drain valves, called cylinder cocks, which are at the front and rear of the cylinder. These allow the water to be expelled from the cylinder, and also produce the iconic clouds of steam as a steam locomotive starts out from a stop.
Just as 4501’s engineer opened the throttle, I captured one of my favorite photos, a close up of the running gear and cylinder as the high pressure steam billowed out of the open cylinder cocks. I was on the shaded side of the locomotive, and the blue tones on the metal make it seem as if the simmering locomotive is cool to the touch, and the scalding steam seems almost inviting.
As 4501 pulled away, the little industrial center cleared quickly of all the rail fans. I left as well, headed to the next point on my planned route. That, however, will be a story for another post.
I hope you've enjoyed these images, and more will soon follow. Please check back soon for the next chapter in the story!
Timothy
Planespotting In Nashville
A couple weeks ago, my best friend from high school flew into KBNA with the best ride to show up at Signature Aviation. Micah is a crew chief for VMM-264, operating the MV-22 Osprey, and two weeks ago, three of the Ospreys flew into to Nashville via New York for a training flight. In addition, it was a celebratory final flight for five pilots. A couple were going to the airlines, and the others were going to desk jobs, but they all came to Nashville to celebrate, after having pizza in New York and taking a nice photo op while passing the Statue of Liberty and Freedom Tower of the WTC.
After arriving into Nashville Friday evening, there was no flying scheduled for Saturday, so Micah and I got to hang out for the first time in over three years. We both love aviation photography, and before Micah’s recent deployment to the Middle East, he purchased an entry level Canon DSLR like the one I have. If you check out his Instagram profile (@roebot17), you will find a good bit of his lovely work from his deployment.
The morning was spent catching up (and drinking plenty of coffee), before we headed back to Nashville in the afternoon along with my wife to get a little tour of the Osprey. While not Micah’s favorite choice of assignment when he joined the Marines, he has grown to love the aircraft, and my wife and I had a wonderful time getting a tour of the aircraft. The pinnacle for me was getting to sit in the cockpit with my best friend while we discussed procedures and the operational quirks of perhaps the most versatile aircraft in the US inventory.
A photo my wife took of Micah and me sitting in the cockpit of one of the Ospreys.
After hanging out with the Ospreys for about half an hour, we drove to the official airplane watching area at Nashville, located at the end off of Vultee Boulevard. It was the first time Micah and I had gotten to photograph airplanes together, and we were decidedly more enthusiastic about it than my wife, who is the farthest thing from an avgeek.
From the planespotting area, we had a wonderful view across the airport, with the V-22s from Micah’s squadron positioned on taxiway U directly opposite of our vantage point.
The majority of traffic in Nashville is Southwest’s 737s, and a mix of Delta, American, and United 737s and Airbus aircraft, ranging from A319s to A321s. The rest of the traffic consists of Embraers and CRJs operated by United and American’s contractors. However, there is a daily British Airways flight direct from London Heathrow using a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner. When we arrived at the spotting area, the 787 wasn’t at the gate. A quick check of FlightAware confirmed our hopes. BA223 was only about twenty minutes out, inbound on the PASLY4 arrival into Nashville. After shooting photos of a couple Southwest departures and a handful of United, Alaska, and American Eagle arrivals, we spotted the Dreamliner’s landing lights as the plane descended below 10,000 feet.
Alaska flight 1100 arriving inbound from San Francisco, just a few minutes prior to British Airways 223’s arrival.
On its return flight to London, the British Airways flight occasionally uses the KRSTA3 departure, usually when the weather is more favorable to take a more northern flight path than usual. The initial waypoint on the KRSTA3, CERAH, is only about two or three miles east of my house, and jets going northbound cross over consistently between 12,000 and 17,000 feet. It was only because I would occasionally see the BA Dreamliner go over our house that I knew the plane frequently operated in and out of Nashville, and the prospect of seeing the jet close up was quite exciting.
When I told my wife—who was sitting in the car while Micah and I geeked out—that the British Airways flight that often flew over the house was inbound, she replied with a semi-enthusiastic, “Oh, cool!” to which I very enthusiastically replied, “Yeah! It’s going to be awesome!” As the biggest jet that Nashville services entered the downwind leg for runway 02L, several other cars pulled into the parking lot. Surprisingly to me, at least five other people arrived just to watch the Dreamliner land, which is a daily occurrence and certainly not out of the ordinary.
British Airways 223 flaring just prior to touchdown on runway 02L.
The primary impression was simply the size of the 787. There are plenty of aircraft bigger, but the Dreamliner is the largest plane routinely operating in and out of Nashville, and it dwarfs the 737s and A321s. As the 787 exited the runway at the very end, I looked back at my wife and her eyes were as big as plates. “That thing was huge! I didn’t realize how big that plane would be!” She understood why Micah and I were losing our minds.
After the 787 landed, we stayed for about another hour, just shooting whatever pictures we could while the light faded. A thick altocumulus cloud deck had moved in from the west, and it quickly got to the point to where the photos were becoming unusable, either due to noise from a high ISO or motion blur from longer and longer shutter speeds in an attempt not to push the ISO too high.
All in all, it was a successful day. We’d gotten a personal tour of the “plopter”, and Micah and I shot about ten gigabytes of photos each, and made memories more precious than any of the photos. I’d gotten to hear stories from Micah’s deployment, from the fun adventures to the near-death experiences. Even with software refinements that have made the V-22 immensely safer than it was at its creation, it is still an unforgiving bird to fly.
While Micah and I were in the cockpit of the Osprey going over emergency procedures in the operating handbook, my wife was in the back of the aircraft, and she took a quick picture on her phone of one of the crew members helmet and gear laying on the seat. Later that night, after we’d dropped Micah off at the hotel and we had gotten home, she sent me all of the photos she’d taken that day, and that particular photo grabbed my heart. It told a story to me that was very sobering. Even though at the time this aircraft was in Nashville, Tennessee, deep within the heart of the United States, just a few months before it had been in Kuwait, and on a Navy ship in the Persian Gulf. The V-22’s are finicky birds, and several have been lost on ship-borne takeoffs like the ones Micah participated on during his deployment. Men have been lost, laying their lives out on the line in service to the United States, and that is the story this photo told me. It was a story of the men who didn’t come home. It is with that tribute that I will bring this story to an end.
