Happy Thanksgiving!

Thursday was the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, generally considered to be the busiest travel period of the year. Popularly, it is believed that the two busiest travel days of the year are the day before Thanksgiving and the Sunday after. I haven't tried to verify that, but certainly the traffic getting into LAX was horrible on Wednesday. That evening I tried to get a few shots to show the traffic backed up on the roads leading into the terminal complex:

Granted, these are all poor shots, especially the last, but they hopefully give an idea of the reason that people complain about the traffic at and around LAX.  My commute to work that day brought me in via Lincoln Blvd, which runs parallel to the north complex runways. It took me a half hour to get from the right edge of the first photo to the control tower. I could have walked it in half of that. 

Earlier this week it was reported that Air France has become the second airline to begin retiring its A380 fleet. Here is the Thanksgiving Day Air France A380 departure to Paris:

On Thanksgiving Day, we had a wind shift and rain, and so we turned the airport around and went east traffic. Air traffic was relatively light on the holiday itself, and so it was possibly the easiest turn around we've ever had. We even had a double rainbow:

As it so happened, we had more rain the day after Thanksgiving. Thanks to CS and one of his buddies with airport ops, here's a much nicer shot of today's rainbow:

More Specials!

The morning after I published the previous post featuring various special paint jobs, AeroMexico brought in the Dreamliner in the opening shot. That was enough impetus for me to dig through the recent archives to find some more specials to show you. Some of these feature special livery, while others are special for some other reason.

China Airlines (callsign: Dynasty) is the latest carrier to bring in the new Airbus 350.

Our newest cargo operator at LAX uses the radio callsign Cargo South. This is a pretty elaborate paint scheme for a freighter.

JetBlue wants you to know that they fly jets.

Although this one isn't blue.

New Zealand All Blacks B777. I bet the air conditioning works overtime on this airplane!

Southwest has a number of state-themed aircraft representing states that they serve; this is Tennessee

California

New Mexico

 Emirates is looking pretty sporty

Special paint!

It's only been a month since my last post, so this time around I'll be showing you a collection of aircraft wearing special paint schemes. The opening shot features an El Al Dreamliner. In June, El Al began service between Tel Aviv and Las Vegas. Las Vegas is El Al's third U.S. west coast (sort of) destination. Besides Los Angeles, which has been their only west coast city for many years, El Al has also started service to San Fransisco. This brings them up to six US destinations, the others being Boston, Newark, and New York.

I think I've shown you this Jet Blue Airbus before, but it passed through today so I thought it was worth another look. Unfortunately, this time of year features a rather unflattering angle of the sun, so photos sometimes do not come out as I would like. The red on this A320 is a traditional fire engine red, and not really as murky as it appears here.

This aircraft has been something of a wraith for me. I've heard about it from coworkers for weeks, but it has always eluded the camera. My first sight of it was late one night about a week ago, which was just a tease. But it came through today and I braved the bad light to get some shots for you. These have been tweaked to bring out some of the detail in the design.

An interesting note is that United put all this effort into a B757, when the general trend is that this model is being retired from mainline fleets. To be sure, we see dozens of them everyday at LAX, mainly from United and Delta, although American still has some as well. As both American and United both have been hit by the grounding of the B737 MAX, I wonder if the B757 will stick around a little bit longer than originally planned. Pure speculation on my part!

Speaking of the B737 MAX, one of the first aircraft to wear United's new livery was a B737 MAX that passed through LAX the day after the announcement of the new paint. Since the MAX's grounding, we haven't seen the new livery until it showed up on a couple of other aircraft this month:

The top photo is an A319; the lower is a B737-800 (Next Generation, not a MAX). Here, in no particular order, are a few more specials:

Finally, you may have heard that we've entered fire season here in California. There are four named fires at the moment; this is last night's sunset. There are no clouds in this photo:

Random shots

It's the first full day of fall here, and I'll open with a shot from a couple of weeks ago of the rising Harvest Moon. That's it just to the right of center; the string of lights on the left is the final for Runway 25 Left. I can't claim credit for this shot, which will be a theme for much of this post.

I think I've mentioned before that I often leave a camera stashed in the tower in case somebody sees something photo-worthy when I'm not around. Sometimes they'll tell me that they took some pictures of something, and sometimes it's left for me to discover when I download them from the camera. That's what happened here:

How we came to have a dinosaur keeping an eye on the traffic at LAX, I'm not sure that I want to know. As far as I know, no controllers were injured during this incident, although the doughnuts did suffer casualties.

These next two, I will claim credit for:

 

Who thought this was a good idea?

Family photo

Here's one that I wish I could claim credit for:

Just passin' through

Special thanks to CS and his buddy at Airport Ops for this shot!

End of the month wrap-up

Somehow it's already the end of July. I'm not sure how that happened, but here we are. The opening shot is a Philippines B777-300 arriving from Manila. Next, this week's construction photos:

 

And now, one more plane photo:

I may have mentioned it before, but I believe Volaris was the first carrier to bring the A320neo to LAX. We saw the plane with the purple cowlings for quite some time before we realized that it was a neo. Most of the neos at LAX are 321s. The Southwest is a B737-800. This is an NG with the split Scimitar winglets.