Looking Around Solent Express on the Beach

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In a previous post, I discussed how the hovercraft, Solent Express, made a visit to the beach at Lee on Solent. Once they had parked her on the beach, the public was encouraged to come and have a look around her. Plenty of people took the opportunity! She is a large hovercraft compared to the ones that run the Ryde-Southsea service with a capacity of 130 passengers. Her size is apparent when up close. Also, because she was on the slope of the shore and on a ridge, there was a large drop from the bow to the ground making her look even more sizeable.

There was plenty of time to have a look around. I got both close and also up on the embankment above the beach to get a wider view. Having so many people walking about really gave some scale to her. She was a little way out of the water when she landed, and the stern was on the beach. However, the tide was coming in and, by the time they departed, this was well in the water. More of that at a later stage.

I did get to take a look at some of the design features. The skirt is an integral part of the hovercraft and, while it looks flexible and flimsy from a distance, when you get close up and see how thick it is and how it is joined together, you appreciate it is a lot sturdier than it initially appears. Given the conditions that is has to experience, this really shouldn’t be such a surprise.

The ducted props at the rear are substantial. The props are large and the ducts with their flaps for directing the flow are big pieces of engineering. The carbon fibre drive shafts looked particularly cool to someone with an engineering background. All in all, she was quite the craft.

Everything About Eagles That I Love

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As a kid, I was a big fan of the F-15 Eagle. It was the fighter of the 70s and 80s and its size and power were so impressive to me as a kid. It could also go faster than almost anything else (although it wouldn’t in real life). The big wing (causing the nickname flying tennis court) and the nodding inlets looked excellent. Aerobraking and the speedbrake are just a bonus. Being able to see them so close up when at Red Flag was a big treat for me. I am so glad that the EX model means that they will be around for a while yet. Here are some shots of the jets that, I assure you, resulted in a big grin on my face at the time.

Night at the Cathedral

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We bought tickets for an orchestral performance of The Planet Suite at Winchester Cathedral. It was still daylight when we went in before the start of the event but, by the time it was over, it was dark outside. The illumination on the cathedral was really nice and the ability of a modern phone to compile an image in those conditions still amazes me. I stitched together some shots to make this image. I also took a few inside the cathedral between the parts of the performance. Low light really does make for more interesting shots.

More on the Dash 7 Theme

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I had a recent post about a testbed Dash 7. That had resulted from finding some other shots that I was looking for to use in a project. That was regarding two defunct airlines that had operated from London City Airport when it first started operations. The only aircraft that was initially allowed to use the airport was the de Havilland Canada Dash 7. The initial operator was Brymon Airways that, if memory serves me right, was based in Plymouth.

A second operator joined them at LCY with the imaginative name of London City Airways. Their livery included a fin designed to look like a business suit. The target market was city workers that didn’t want to make the trek out to Heathrow. It wasn’t long before there was a push to get jet aircraft into the airport. The BAe146 was the only option at that point and a demonstration was undertaken in 1988. I was there for the CAA and had a chance to get out on the ramp at one point. I got these photos during that visit. The 146 did become a regular feature and then runway expansions allowed a variety of larger aircraft to use the airport with slightly less restrictive approach paths.

How Advanced Spam Has Become

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I have some automated filters on the comments section of this blog. They do a solid job of removing the seemingly endless selection of useless messages that bots deliver to the website. When the comment is a more human sounding message, they go to the pending folder for me to approve. However, recently, I have seen a far higher number of messages appear in that folder and they seem to be real. Below is a selection of the recent messages received.

That’s a really interesting project – it’s great to see how practical applications like Helinet can be showcased in visual media.
Sounds like a really busy but rewarding day of travel and photography. Itchen Abbas is a bit of a trek from the Watercress Line!
It’s amazing how much technology was packed into those older helicopters. They really were impressive machines.
That’s a really interesting spot you’ve found. I wonder if they might be used to encourage fish to gather and feed?
That’s really fascinating, it’s amazing to think about how much equipment is involved in modern movie productions.

These might all look like someone had been reading the posts and commenting on them. However, when you look at the website links that are associated with the comments, they are all odd websites in Korea. It appears to me that there are some decent AI elements that are scanning the posts and creating plausible comments that can then get the links into the comments section. It is not an overwhelming level of commenting at this point, so I am comfortable sending them to spam. However, it does have me wondering whether this is going to grow to a level that is really troubling. Hopefully the spam filters will get more adept at identifying the dodgy links that are associated with the comments and junking them, but we shall see.

Catalina at RIAT

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I had seen a few Catalina family aircraft in recent years living in the PNW. I was a little surprised by this one showing up at Fairford for RIAT last year. Sadly, I only got to see it on the ground as it taxied in after arriving. I don’t know when it departed and why I missed it, but such is life. Here are a few shots of it. The blister windows on the rear fuselage look a lot slicker than the original design!

Farley Mount

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I had noticed Farley Mount on a map when randomly looking at what is the area around Winchester but hadn’t planned a specific visit to it. Then, one afternoon, I was riding through the area and saw the sign to the car park. I wasn’t in any great hurry so decided to divert to take a look. There is a track that runs from the car park up to the structure and, since it was pretty quiet, I rode up there on my bike. The surface was rough, but my new bike has bigger tyres, and it seemed to be fine.

Apparently, the monument is to a horse that fell into a pit while out hunting but survived and went on to win a race. Seems like quite a strange thing to create such a large monument to but landowners have built far stranger things over the years (and still do), so why question it too much. The top of the structure is a pyramid shape. With plenty of trees growing up around it, it was a touch tricky getting an angle with the light that I liked but, since this was mid bike ride, I wasn’t working hard on the shot options. Time to get back on the road and continue home.

This is an Old Hornet!

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This US Navy Hornet was rolling out at Nellis AFB during a Red Flag exercise. Looking at it now, it doesn’t have the antenna locations that the C model had so this must be an old A model. The US Navy has now retired all of its original Hornets (although the Marines haven’t relinquished all of theirs yet). However, when it took this, I think that the Navy was mainly using C models so this must have been on its last legs. I do love the look with the speedbrake deployed. There was a Charlie as well so I shall include that for fun.

Reappearance of Something Long Gone

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I saw a post online about something coming to Lee on Solent near the Hovercraft Museum on a Saturday morning. A silhouette was posted which looked like it might have been Solent Express. This is a hovercraft that was built nearly twenty years ago and operated for a while on the Ryde-Southsea route with Hovertravel. It is a BHT130 and was found to be too large for the route and not commercially suited to the operation. In 2011 it was laid up pending an alternative operator being found. Since then, it has been stored at varying locations. I got photos of it when it was originally in operation and had wondered whether I might see it stored but hadn’t really pursued that idea.

Then, recently some images of it showed up on the pad at Ryde as it was being used for some testing and demonstration ahead of a potential sale to a new customer. The idea that it might be the subject of the Saturday event seemed pretty plausible. Sure enough, the announcement was made that it would come to the shore at Lee on Solent, everyone would be able to get a good look at it on the beach, then it would do a short demo on the water before heading off. I figured that this was definitely something I would like to do. Sure, I had a guest for the weekend, but they weren’t going to miss me for a few hours.

The weather was pretty ideal. The sun was out but the air temps weren’t very high. A bit of a breeze but nothing too serious. I wasn’t sure how busy it was going to be so got there in plenty of time to scope it out and find a location. I had plenty to work with. People gradually drifted in but there was never a completion for space. I decided to start out slightly up the bank near the slipway for the arrival. I would change later on.

While the hovercraft wasn’t due in until 10:15, it was visible for quite a while before. I saw it off in the distance heading in and thought it was going to be early, but they were busy doing some manoeuvring out in the Solent and weren’t coming ashore just yet. It wasn’t too long to wait, though. Soon they were heading for the beach. I was split in my mind about what I wanted to get. I love stills but the motion of a hovercraft really shows well in video. I decided video would be the main focus, but I would get as many stills as I could. Fortunately, unlike aircraft, hovercraft are not so fast that you can’t switch back and forth without creating a massive disconnect in the video timeline.

There was a large ridge in the shingle on the beach, but a hovercraft doesn’t have any issue transitioning such a discontinuity. They pulled up on to the beach and then settled down. A shorter time while they shut down and then the beach was back open to allow everyone to get a closer look. I think I am spending enough time on this post already, so I am going to split it into multiple parts. More to come.

Virgin America A321neo

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I recently posted a Virgin America A320 thinking back to when they were an airline before getting swallowed up. Then I got involved in looking for some other images of them and got thinking about their introduction of the A321neo. That got me to this image I took when they were early in their use. As with a lot of images recently, I took a fresh look at how to process it and went through my current approach to get a better result than I had achieved when I first took it. I like the look of the bigger engines on the neo and the A321 is a nicely proportioned plane.