Something old, something new

Today I got to catch an airplane I've known about for some time but have only seen once, and that when the camera wasn't handy. This Lufthansa B747-8I  wears a legacy livery that, in my humble opinion, is much more appealing than the new livery that Lufthansa has recently introduced. Since Lufthansa operates the B747-8 seasonally at LAX, it's been months since the last time I saw this airplane and I've been hoping to catch it ever since.

 Just to recap, Lufthansa's livery went from this:

To this:

 And now this:

In other livery news, United just announced their new paint scheme yesterday. And then lo and behold, look what taxied out this afternoon:

This chance shot shows the new United colors on a B737-800 and the retiring ex-Continental colors on a SkyWest E-175:

 

Congratulations to DD and MK, our latest controllers to finish training -- just in time for summer! 

New Arrivals

Along with the return of many of our seasonal carriers, LAX has a a couple of new ones. Air Italy and Finnair both appeared in the same week. One offers service to Milan, the other Helsinki. I'll let you guess which is which.  Air Italy is currently using A330-200s for their Los Angeles service, although these are scheduled to be replaced by B787s. Finnair is using new A350-900s.

Dreaming of Dreamliners

Now that we're approaching the summer travel season, a number of our seasonal carriers have returned to LAX. This post started out as just a mention of some of those, but it has morphed into a collection of Dreamliner shots. Nearly all show some variant of the B787 with some other model of aircraft for the sake of comparison. This is not a comprehensive catalog of Dreamliner operators at LAX, in part because that list gets longer all the time. I will mention that China Southern and KLM are the latest carriers to bring Dreamliners to LAX, and both of them appear directly below. Other recent converts to the B787 include Air Tahiti and El Al, also included in this post.

 

 

Special Supers

Wowsers, what happened to the month of March? So much for my goal of two posts per month!
Meanwhile, here are a couple of A380s with special paint. I've shown you other Emirates A380s with green and blue markings for the Expo 2020; this was the first time that I've seen the gold version.