Happy Halloween!

For all you spooks, ghouls, ghosts, and goblins:  Happy Halloween. As we wrap up October, how about one more look at Breast Cancer Awareness month. I rummaged through the archives and found these:

In other news, the tower elevator is still out of service for renovation. Last I heard, the record for climbing the 313 stairs is just under two minutes at 1:56. No, it wasn't me - my marathon days are over. Too much trick or treating . . .

Shot of the day

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness month, but it would seem that maybe it should be the International Breast Cancer Awareness month.

Climbing the stairs

After three weeks of delay thanks to the congressional fiasco, renovation of the tower elevator has begun, and so now we get to warm up for each shift by climbing the stairs. If I've never mentioned it before, LAX tower is a 21-story building. The contractors are hoping to have the work done in a little under three weeks. Meanwhile, I probably need a new pair of shoes.

The Harvest Moon rising over a cluster of evening arrivals.

The new TBIT gates

Last week, I showed you the interior of the newly-opened part of the Tom Bradley International Terminal. I also mentioned that with the opening of the west-side gates, the C-10 gates have been closed in preparation for demolition of the old TBIT structure. Once it's gone, there will be new TBIT gates in the C-10 alley. The same thing will happen at the north end, in the D-10 alley. Meanwhile, however, all the new gates on the west side of the TBIT are virtually invisible from the control tower. We can see the tip of the tail on aircraft parked at a few of them, but others are completely blocked by the high-arching roofline of the new TBIT. To help us keep track of who's where, and which gates are open or occupied, the airport has installed some video cameras with a feed to a screen in the tower. Here's how we see the west side of the TBIT:

That's Taxiway S running across from left to right. If you look to the right, you'll see the first section of the new Taxiway T under construction. That is where the old American Eagle terminal and American Airlines maintenance hanger used to be. Here's another view, courtesy of a LAWA diagram:

And yet another

 

I missed the very first British Airways A380 arrival at LAX, but here's the first one I've seen during daylight hours. I think the British Airways livery looks good on the A380. So far, out of British Airways' three daily LAX flights, we're getting one A380 per day. In fact, I'm not even sure that we get one every day yet. This brings us up to seven A380s per day at LAX: Two from Qantas, and then one each from Air France, British Airways, China Southern, Korean, and Singapore. We expect our eighth A380 to arrive in early December, when Emirates (who is the largest A380 operator) brings theirs back to LAX - for real this time.

Teaser shot: Emirates really has been here before with an A380. This was the end of summer, 2008, when Emirates first announced that they were beginning service to Los Angeles. The actual revenue flights have been serviced with B777s, but with the promise that LAX would eventually get A380 service. Here's how it looked in 2008:

Welcome to the shutdown

Okay, not really. There's plenty about that everywhere else. Suffice to say that your controllers are still on the job, with the expectation that we'll get paid . . . someday. In an ironic twist, there are actually more controllers on the job right now. That's because those who had vacation time are coming to work instead -- if you take time off during the shutdown, be it vacation or sick, that becomes unpaid furlough time. So most of us are cancelling our leave and coming to work because we like getting paid, even if it's not right away.

Enough of that. How about some airplane pictures:

LA County leases a pair of Bombardier CL-415 SuperScoopers for the Santa Ana wind fire season. They passed over LAX last week, on their way to deal with a large brush fire south of LA.

In other news, it seems we may not have seen the last of KLM's MD-11s after all:

Finally, a VIP arrival from nearly a month ago that I've been meaning to share: