October update

We're well into autumn in Los Angeles; we've even had a smattering of rain - a sure sign that summer is behind us. Meanwhile, construction around the airport progresses. We'll start by taking a look at Terminal 3, which has recently opened:

Here we see the B767 being test-fit on the new Gate 37A

Until I looked at this photo, I had not noticed how far the jetway for the new Gate 33 can extend

 Meanwhile, on the south side of the terminal complex:

Terminal 5, in the center of this shot, is pretty much all open. This terminal hosts nearly all JetBlue and Spirit flights along with some American flights as well, and has become an almost all-Airbus terminal. On the right, you can see that the southern end of Terminal 4 has been completely removed.

Terminal 6 is still receiving gate-by-gate renovation. In this shot, you can see aircraft parked at the recently-opened Gates 64A and 64B. These will eventually get re-numbered, as that solitary E175 on left side of the photo is on Gate 62. There is at least one closed gate in the blocked-off area with the new concrete (it was formerly Gate 64). On the west side, Gates 61 and 63 are closed for renovation

It may not be obvious in the earlier shot of Terminals 5 & 4, but we also had a section of Taxiway C closed for pavement replacement. This closure ran nearly all summer, along with another section of Taxiway C further to the west.

Here's a shot of our ground radar, showing the two closed sections of Taxiway C. They don't look like much, but the location of these two closures made ground control quite challenging this summer. If you look closely, you can see that the radar map and the photo show different phases of the construction, as the closed section in the photo doesn't quite correspond to what's shown on the radar map.

In other news, our traffic count is still holding fairly steady at something like twenty-percent less than in the before times. We did see a bump during the summer compared to January:

As you can see, our highest days this year (so far) have barely broken 1700 operations. Before the pandemic, we would have been around 2000 operations per day. Let's wrap up with some gratuitous airplane pics: