Sure, we're halfway through January already, but nonetheless Happy New Year! Those of you who are local know that there are currently three main road entrances into the LAX terminal complex. Each of these is adorned with a large LAX as a entryway marker. For the holiday season, the airport dresses these up with snowflake designs. When you take a close look, you can see that these snowflakes are actually composed of airplanes! I noticed this last year, but had to wait a year to catch it with the camera.
A day or two after Christmas, I went to the little hilltop park in El Segundo and took these shots:
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| This shot features nearly all of the A380 operators at LAX |
Another night shot shows three gates (61, 50B, 51A) that have been closed for renovation work:
Meanwhile, this shot of Terminal 3 gives a hint of things to come:
The Midfield Satellite Concourse has started receiving jetways:
Birds are a common sight at LAX. So common, in fact, that a warning to pilots is included in the airport information publications. Not too surprising, since the airport runways end at the sand dunes along the beach. Less common are birds on the airplanes:
There are almost certainly birds somewhere in this picture, but one upside of the winter season is the sunsets:
And a special Happy New Year congratulations to MX, who started 2020 by becoming our first fully certified controller of the new year!
Husband was at 3 yesterday at the bottom of 33 and 37 doing lock repair. I remember using the stairs at 33 going down to the crew bus to get to the hangar and the parking lot way back in the day. Dad had an assigned parking space so it was nice to get out faster.
ReplyDeleteA Happy New Year to you, too, Captainvector.
ReplyDeletePicture Cv1510362.JPG : I am still amused by the greenish tint of the Parking lights.
Picture Cv1510348.JPG : I am astounded at the scope of the construction at T3. I was not aware of any planned construction there. All but one of my bookmarks at the lawa.org site that linked pdfs with progress reports are dead.
The one that remains,
https://www.lawa.org/en/projects-and-reports/lax-program-status-report
stoppped adding reports after Dec 2018.
Coming back to T3, I am happy they preserved the island of the original terminal. Looking at it, it is not difficult to imagine it with DC-8s, 720s or Electras manoeuvering around it! When did the practise of jets pulling up to the gate, nose-in, and pushing them out with a tug, started?
The progress on the Midfield Terminal looks great! Will it be brought into service this year? One drawback of the lack of the pdf documents I mentioned is I have no idea what the excavations to the North of the TBIT core are about. I think they are related to infrastructure for baggage handling, but I can't figure why they are on the 'wrong' side with respect to the Midfield concourse. They must have provided for a tunnel through the TBIT concourse, but I wonder why they made two different excavation pits, instead of one single building site.
P.S.: On Google Maps, when you click the 'maps' button, you can still see the outline of the concourses of the original TBIT.
Best regards, Captainvector, and thank you again for the nice pictures.
--Filip
What used to be in the big sandbox at terminal 3?
ReplyDelete