Retro Roo, and a 717 too!
My sole airport visit this week was mid afternoon on Sunday, primarily to photograph the Qantas Boeing 737 wearing the scheme adapted from their livery used throughout the 70s and early 80s, a livery I have wanted to see for quite some time.
I arrived just in time to see the purpose of my visit touchdown, Qantas Boeing 737-800 VH-XZP, named after the late James Strong, CEO of Qantas between 1993 and 2003. Unfortunately heat haze prevented any longer range shots as it came down along the runway.
Just as -XZP taxied in to park, QantasLink Boeing 717-200 VH-YQX pushed back and soon took off to Sydney. I went into more depth about -YQX’s history in a a previous post, you can read that here; https://ymhb.net/2020/11/11/ymhb-spotting-8-11-20/
Soon after the 717’s departure, these two peculiar little airframes came over and made sharp turns round to land at Cambridge Aerodrome’s runway 30. These turned out to be two of Kennedy Aviation’s Airtractor AT802 water bombers, that will be assist in the 2020/21 firefighting efforts in Tasmania.
The final aircraft I photographed this week was Virgin Australia Boeing 737-800 VH-VOK. Now VA’s oldest aircraft, -VOK was delivered to Virgin Blue in August 2003 as “Smoochy Maroochy”, its current name is Johanna Beach. Next week’s spotting update should be pretty interesting, as in the interim we are set to have Cathay Pacific 777 and Qantas 787 visits, among others!