Saturday, November 7, 2009

Visitors from the North

Come the cool down of fall, the number of movements at Ft Lauderdale always increases. The charters from the cold of Canada as well as the increase of regular commercial traffic adds to the increased traffic. During this time, there can be some interesting schemes to be seen. Here are some that have been seen over the past years, and hopefully will be seen again this winter season.


Air Transat brings in their Airbuses - the A310 and the A330-200 and A330-300. What is always nice about their A310 is they get the Christmas treatment



Canjet got a new color scheme a couple of years ago and since then, I always wanted to get the new scheme - finally last year I did. Canjet sometimes also lease a B737-800 from Transavia in Holland for the season and hopefully this year, they will again and I'll be able to catch that one.



Skyservice is one that operates on an irregular basis and so when they can be caught, it's always nice to get them. Last year, they had just received their B757's from Thomas Cook.



Sunwings are regular visitors in the season. They normally have 3 or 4 different color schemes on their B737-800s. This one is the basic XL color scheme that their lease during the season.



Westjet is really not classed as a charter into Ft Lauderdale as they do operate a scheduled service. However, sometimes, it's nice to get their aircraft that don't normally operate to South Florida - in this case, their B737-600 - they are the only commercial operator of this B737 variant in North America.



Air Canada is the only year round regular scheduled commercial airline from Canada. However, in the fall and winter season, they also start to bring in some of the aircraft that are a change from the normal Airbuses. In this case, their B767-300ER.


Now that the fall and winter season is starting, it's going to be interesting to see what graces our runways and taxiways.....who knows.....

5 comments:

Tim G in MN said...

You are very lucky to have such open spots to take pictures from. Here at MSP it seems really difficult to get a clear shot without fencing in the way. How did you get the Canjet shot? Looks like a higher up position.

Tim G in MN

Mark Lawrence said...

Tim
That's taken from the top of the parking garage - again - open access and there is an official viewing area too.

Tim G in MN said...

Are you using a pretty long lens and steadying it on a pod of some sort?
I'm using a Nikon D40 with the standard Nikkor 55-200 zoom, but it doesn't get me there.
Do you do any cropping before posting the pics to your site, or are they "as taken". Nothing wrong with cropping, I'm just trying to understand the practices.

Security at MSP seems to frown on photogs on the parking ramp from what I've heard.
Thanks!!

Tim G in MN

Mark Lawrence said...

Tim

I have a 28-300 and a 100-400 lens that I use on the top of the parking garage - both go on my Nikon D50 - and yes - I do edit all the pictures I put on here. They are basically smaller versions of pictures I submit to jetphotos.net and they have to be aligned, cropped, and sharpened before they can go there. I use Adobe Photoshop for editing.

Mark

Tim G in MN said...

Thanks Mark!

Tim G in MN