Monday, June 27, 2011

Retro United


Devoted readers: My apologies for the drought of new posts. A road trip to Texas for Father's Day, another to Needles* to inspect a Bonanza, the final week of The Mandragola, along with set construction and rehearsals for The Merry Wives of Windsor, not to mention actually going to work and a lack of inspiration, all conspired to keep me away from the keyboard.

Speaking of work, we're now well into June, and LAX is once again experiencing "June gloom", the low clouds and/or fog that are common around this time of year. I've talked about the marine layer before, so I won't belabor the topic again except to explain that it tends to produce lousy photographs: A few of you have commented that some of the photos I've shown you lately have been oddly tinted. A lot of that comes from the overall gray from the overcast, but in some shots it's due to my shooting the picture through the tower's window shades because there wasn't time to do it any other way. Today's shots are a combination of both - sorry about that.


One of the other guys pointed out this retro-paint United A320 to me last week. I hadn't seen it before (and haven't seen it again since). Hopefully at some point I'll get a chance for some better shots. Meanwhile, the Continental-United transition is moving along: Nearly all of the Continental airplanes that we see have been re-lettered for United. The United fleet is not changing as fast: While some of them have been repainted, we still see a good number of aircraft wearing the old gray-top United livery - which was superseded by the blue and white livery, which is in turn being replaced by the Continental-United hybrid scheme. As far as I can tell, the two carriers are still being run in parallel. Continental is still operating (expanding, actually) out of Terminal Six, while United is at Terminals Seven and Eight. Likewise, Continental aircraft go to one maintenance ramp, and United's go to the other. I read an interesting article about all the decisions that have to be made while combining the two airlines at Cleveland.com



* - Trivial question time. What famous comic strip character had a connection to Needles, CA?

4 comments:

  1. Snoopy's brother--Spike?

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  2. Expanding out of Terminal 6! Poor souls. Last update from the airport showed some of the construction in T6. Looked like a construction zone not an airport

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  3. Ah the June gloom. Most of the time its not an issue but a few weeeks ago it was. I flew a charter GTU-SAN and had to use NYL (Yuma) as an legal alternate (none of the airports in the SoCal area could give us legal alternate minimums). This can get tricky when flying an airplane that can't pack on 5 hours of fuel. Other than regularly using SLC as an alternate for JAC, it's the first time I've had to pick an alternate that was in another state. We didn't get in to SAN and luckily we got in to CRQ. Our passengers were livid! They had no idea how close they were to ending up in L.A. or even worse, Yuma!
    B

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