Remote Gates, revisited

Nearly seven years ago, I made a post inspired by the viewing statistics of the blog: https://fromthecontroltower.blogspot.com/2011/05/remote-gates.html

The amazing thing is that, seven years later, that post is the second-most popular post of all time.*  Even now, it gets a couple of dozen visits every week. Most, but not all, come from a forum post at airliners.net in which a question was asked about the gate numbers at the LAX west remote gates. The reason I tell you all of this is because it occurred to me that we are using a revised version (seen above) of the quick reference guide that I showed in that 2011 post.

Beyond that, I don't have much new to say about the west remote gates. At a quick glance, pretty much everything I said about them in 2011 still holds true except that we now have six (instead of four) remote gates that can accommodate the A380. We rarely use them though because the remodeled TBIT can handle six A380s at one time. In fact, the most common place at the remotes that we use for an A380 isn't a gate at all: Recently, the airport has been closing a section of Taxiway E-17 to store an idle A380 between flights. On the chart above, it's the section of E-17 directly above the green and orange boxes. The A380 tows into that position from Taxiway AA, and to get out it has to push backwards either into E-16 (and then pull forward) or all the way back onto AA. I haven't any photos of that because it pretty much always happens in the late evening. I can, however, show you how we designate the closed area on our ground radar display:

* - The all-time most popular post is this one: https://fromthecontroltower.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-endeavour-has-landed.html