A fellow eclipse hunter took the shot for the gang.
Following is CJ's (too brief) recap of his eclipse experience.
On 21 August 2017, people all over the contiguous United States watched a total solar eclipse happen, in which the moon briefly entirely covered the sun (it was less than three minutes, but I don't remember the exact time).
In preparation for the eclipse, two days prior, I went down (along with my dad and my sister) to see my paternal grandparents in Bend, Oregon. Bend is the county seat of Deschutes County, and the largest city in central Oregon.
On the 20th, Nonnie, my sister, dad, and Glenn (a family friend) went on a hike to a nearby hill. I stayed in bed for that portion of the morning, due to being sleepy. Later that day, my dad, sister, and I went to the Juniper Swim & Fitness Center, where we spent a couple hours swimming in the pools and going down a slide.
On the 21st, the three of us and Glenn got up early in the morning to head further down south, to park our car close to a camp full of people who were also eager to see the eclipse. After over an hour of waiting, for just a little over two minutes, the moon was completely blocking the sun. It was very cold, as well as very dark.
PLANE SPOTTING: One of the reasons we love the new MPA campus is that we're right between Boeing Field (to the west) and the Renton Municipal Airport (to the east). Flying machines everywhere!
Today, we drove east, and pulled off into a parking lot on the west side of the Renton airport for the first time ever. What an interesting 10 minutes it was!
Straight off, I took a photo of this brand new Southwest airlines plane, because I have a friend who just loves Southwest planes.
One of the things the kids and I noticed was the plane's interesting split wing tips. We'd never seen that before!
My mind immediately went to another friend, James. An aviation junkie. James was my go-to guy for anything aviation. I could take the worst photo and send it to him and ask, "What the heck is this?" and he'd know.Sadly, James died last year. My aviation Google is gone. :( But today, I posted the photo above to his Facebook page for old time's sake, saying I missed him and his knowledge.
Within moments, one of his aviation geek friends chimed right in, letting me know what we were looking at. He wrote, "The split winglets are a standard piece of equipment on the new 737MAX, the one you saw is probably one of the first 5 ever built and should be delivered in the next couple months."
So neat-o. We saw a relatively rare bird, one of the first of its kind!
The Southwest painted plane wasn't the only split-winged specimen we spied.
There was also this one, below.
Our new aviation friend noted, "That's another 737 MAX8 that's in a test livery, however it's testing life is done and it'll be repainted and delivered to southwest soon."
I love planes, but know so little about them. I asked if 'livery' was the word for the structure around the plane. From that we learned " livery is a fancy word for paint scheme on the plane, so notice it doesn't have an airline livery on it, it's what's called Boeing "house colors".....the Steel cage I think you're referring to is the jet blast wall to prevent any damage behind it during engine runs and reduce noise for the community."
The paint job is an homage to a whale shark. Annabelle loved the eye and nose of the plane.
https://www.knaviation.net/jta-announces-jinbei-737-800
The place we saw today is expected to enter into service around November of this year, per the article on KN Aviation we saw today.
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