Catching up

It's a new year, and things have been a little slow in the aviation blog scene.  Captain Dave at Flight Level 390 has disappeared entirely*; Captain Cockrell at Decision Height and Captain Sam at Blogging at FL250 are both currently not flying for medical reasons; even Totally Jacked Up Aircraft Photos had a quiet spell around New Year's. Meanwhile, here in Southern California, we're experiencing a brutal cold snap that's had overnight temperatures down to nearly freezing.

Okay, that's enough: I can hear the laughter resounding around the world. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Glad I could supply a moment of mirth; would that world peace were half so easy . . .

Now that we're past the holiday season, LAX traffic has quieted; at a rough guess we're running in the neighborhood of a couple hundred operations less daily. The next bump in traffic levels will happen in March for Spring Break. With the holiday peak behind us, the airport is resuming construction projects; we've already had some scattered taxiway closures, and more are scheduled - along with a runway closure.

The Boeing B787 has been in the news again lately; I don't have anything to contribute on that subject other than LAX now has Dreamliners daily: Both United and LAN operate B787s through LAX. So far, United serves Houston, Texas, and Tokyo, Japan; LAN is to/from Santiago, Chile.

For a brief period, we're sometimes hosting seven A380s per day: Air France, China Southern, and Singapore, along with two each from Korean and Qantas; I believe the "extra" Korean A380 is only for the month of January. I personally had the dubious distinction last week of having four moving A380s on frequency at once. Probably not the first time that has occurred, even at LAX, but the first time I've been around when it happened. Speaking of A380s, the airport rearranged some of the parking spots at the west end, where we seem to put at least one A380 each day:

* - What happened to Capt. Dave?