Better late than never – LHR, LGW, LTN, inc L1011 and 727 biz

A little on the late side. Been doing too much with too little time.

I had been suffering from an undiagnosed bluriness problem (as mentioned in another topic on this site), so apologies for the occasional complete loss of sharpness!

Starting with LHR 13.9.08:

Caught both the Finnair and SAS retrojets. Unfortunaetly both ruined by the problem mentioned above. Managed to salvage something for the Fin that will do for here, but the SAS shots are complete chuck-outs.









I stayed until 7:30 for the evening SIA A380 flight. Stupid idea. The light brought speeds down a little, just enough to kill the quality on almost all of them. And what did I get at the end of it? A 747 replacement flight. **** sake!

LGW 27.9.08

I headed down to LGW to see if I could catch one of the L1011s. I couldn’t see how else I was going to catch a civil L1011 these days, I made the trip a priority and put in a lot of forward planning to ensure I wasn’t going to miss a single bus and had my location sorted. Seeing the wind as a clear easterly, I took the bus to the 08 end with the intention of using the crash gate. Should’ve really looked before I stepped, got off the bus to find the planes flying high overhead on 26. No matter, I found a spot under a tree in a field where I took some departure shots (having already seen an L1011 parked up from the bus, I was happy to settle for just dep shots). Weather was excellent, and the bluriness problem was not as obvious here as it was at LHR, although it’s still there if you look closely.

The former Iron Maiden livery aircraft, looking somewhat less interesting.


This MYT aircraft is operating for TCX. But not how you would think. It is on lease from My Travel Scandinavia. Interesting.



And then the aircraft I came for!



Unfortunately, the other L1011 (LuzAir) sat on the ground all day in clear view of my spot. And the Cubana IL-96 just err…. didn’t turn up. The BAA site said nothing about cancellation, delay or even that it had departed. :confused: