Thanksgiving week

It's a big week in the US as we observe the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, which leads right into Black Friday, the first day of the Christmas shopping frenzy. Traditionally two of the busiest traveling days of the year are the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after. Despite the recent loss of Mexicana, we're seeing a bit of a bump in our traffic count, as is usual for the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Years season. Come January, we'll be in the doldrums again until Spring Break.


We've had some lousy weather, which in LA means rain. In this case, about three days' worth. Nothing too serious, but we did get to go east for a few hours this past Saturday. I didn't get any east traffic photos this time around because I was working with a trainee on ground control for his first taste of east traffic. It drove him nuts, but I'm glad he got to see it before we cut him loose and he's on his own.

From the A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words Department: We're starting to get an idea of what the remodeled Tom Bradley International Terminal is going to do to our view of Taxiway S; namely we won't have any. As I've mentioned before, LAX has taxiways that the controllers are responsible for but can't actually see, and it appears that S will join R and AA in the blind spot club. For those of you following along at home, the earth-moving equipment in the the photo above marks the location of Taxiway S, which runs north-south between the two sides of the airport.

Here's an earlier view, showing the monster crane that's being used. This crane is expected to eventually be taller than the control tower, and is already so tall that it restricts the use of the Instrument Landing System (ILS) to the 24 runway complex. Also seen here are two of our resident Qantas A380s, one of which can be seen waiting for a replacement engine. Qantas has announced that they will resume A380 service this coming Saturday, although on the Sidney-London route; I guess the LAX half of their fleet will have to wait a bit longer.

An interesting view of the United maintenance ramp: An A320, with a B752 directly behind

I expected some sort of response from November 9th's bonus points question, but nobody spoke up. While I didn't think many American readers would get it, I thought for sure some of you in Europe would recognize this former Jetairfly aircraft. This airplane actually wore Sun Country colors and a US registration few years ago before being returned to the leasing company, whereupon it went to Jetairfly in Belgium. Here's an earlier photo, taken in Brussels, that I borrowed from Airliners.net:


If the New York team was called the Propellers, would they have to put the name on a different airplane?

A couple of weeks ago, this Horizon Dash 8 took a bird strike and made an emergency landing at LAX. No injuries except for the bird and the airplane's right wing. Reportedly, the damage was severe enough that it's being classified as an accident. That said, the airplane is expected to return to service. Here's another Horizon Dash 8 wearing some new University of Idaho colors:

Other interesting recent LAX visitors:


After the recent weather, some nice shots with no airplanes:

Sunrise

Downtown rarely looks so good

The full moon setting behind the Malibu hills