Shot of the day quiz revealed: LAX A340 family photo

Wow - apparently it was a slow weekend out there in the blogosphere. Lots of you chimed in with comments about this shot, and a number of you nailed it. Several others called out various things I hadn't noticed, so shout outs to you all.

As most of you observed, this photo features three A340s. What I thought was noteworthy about this shot was that it featured all three variants of the Airbus A340 which can regularly be seen at LAX. Namely the A340-300, -500, and -600.  No scheduled carriers bring A340-200s to LAX, although I have seen one here a few times.

Of the three models that we see daily at LAX, the A340-300 is by far the most numerous. Modeled here by Swiss, we also receive A343s from Iberia, Phillipines, and Air Tahiti. Previous A343 operators at LAX include Air France, Lufthansa, LAN, and Virgin Atlantic.

The A340-500 is the rarest of the three variants seen at LAX; less than three dozen were built, and only one carrier still operates them here: Singapore, who has five of them and operates (for a few more months, anyway) the A345 on the longest scheduled routes in the world. The Newark-Singapore route is the longest, followed by LAX-Singapore. Singapore has configured their A345s for 100 passengers (no coach seating), but will be trading their A345 fleet to Airbus as part of a deal to acquire more A380s and A350s. I've seen speculation that Singapore has been losing money on these routes for some time, as the price of fuel has escalated greatly over the last five years. The -500 has the longest range of any of the A340 models; it can fly 9,000 nautical miles (17,000 km), and in order to do that it has a fuel capacity of 59,000 U.S. gallons (222,000 litres). Singapore has said that they're retiring the A345s in accordance with their "young fleet" policy; their A345 fleet is now approaching ten years of age. The only other operator to bring A345s to LAX was Thai, who had four and operated theirs between LAX and Bangkok, a route that I believe was a bit longer than the LAX-Singapore route. Thai's A345s disappeared from LAX last year, replaced by B772s and B773s. The nonstop service to Bangkok went away at the same time; Thai's Boeings now go to Seoul, South Korea, before continuing on to Bangkok. In the same vein as the Singapore speculation, I read somewhere that Thai would have needed to operate their A345s at 120-percent capacity in order to break even on the LAX-Bangkok and similar routes. I suspect that both the Bangkok and Singapore to Los Angeles nonstops were maintained for the prestige of offering the only direct service between those city pairs, but prestigious does not equate to economically viable. I don't know what became of Thai's A345s, but I imagine that Airbus may have some difficulty reselling the ones they're taking in from Singapore, as the A345 is a really niche aircraft, built for really long routes. Emirates operates the world's largest fleet of A340-500s; they have ten, but we don't see them at LAX. I'll be sorry to see the A345s leave; at LAX the -500 is our favorite A340 variant. The big Rolls Royce Trent engines that it shares with the -600 make it a much better performer than the -300, but it doesn't pose all the complications on the ground that we face with the longer -600.

Lufthansa is one of four A340-600 operators at LAX; the others are China Eastern, Iberia, and Virgin Atlantic. Thai also has been seen here in an A346, although I can only recall it happening once or twice; it was not a regular thing. Until the introduction of the Boeing B747-8, the A340-600 was the longest airliner in the world. I've previously detailed the problems that the A346 creates for controllers at LAX, so I won't belabor that point further, except to say that we're glad that there aren't more of them.

Where can we go from here?

One of the neat things about LAX is the wide variety of destinations with direct service. These days, it's possible to get from almost anywhere to nearly anywhere else via the hub and spoke airline connection systems, but direct service is not always so easy to come by. If you're in a city that serves as some airline's hub, i.e. Atlanta (Delta and AirTran), Dallas (American), or Houston (Continental), then you're in good shape. If you're not in one of these places, the first leg of your journey will be to one of them, where you can then get on another airplane that will hopefully take you where you want to go. LAX does serve as a hub for United, American, and Alaska, and thus we have many options with those carriers. Southwest also has a major presence here, as does Delta. Not surprisingly, foreign airlines also have strong availability: Air Canada, Aero Mexico, and Mexicana all have many flights out of L.A. each day.

Many other airlines, foreign and domestic, have limited service from L.A., usually to their respective capitals or hubs. At this writing, there is direct service from L.A. to destinations on five of the seven continents of the world. Currently, we have no direct flights to Antarctica nor Africa. Egypt Air used to serve the latter, but they haven't flown out of L.A. for some time now. Even with at least fifty airlines operating here, not all destinations are served daily; some are only two or three times a week (Moscow and Dublin come to mind).

It's taken me several weeks to compile a list of destinations, airlines, and flight times; even so, it may well not be complete. If I'd done it in August, there would be at least a dozen more destinations than what are now available. Presentation is the problem: I don't want to just paste a great big table or list of destinations here, as that would be pretty clunky. So instead, I'll just hit various interesting highlights as they occur to me:

Shortest and Longest:

The shortest scheduled flight out of LAX is twelve minutes: Skywest flies non-stop to Oxnard, which is just up the coast from the LA area. Thanks to where Skywest parks on the airport, it can sometimes take this flight longer to get to the runway than it does to get to its destination once airborne.

The longest scheduled flight out of LAX is the Singapore Airlines flight to Singapore, which in the summer takes about sixteen and a half hours. In the winter time, I've seen it run closer to eighteen. At present, no one else makes this run out of LA, and Singapore does it with the Airbus A340-500, seen here arriving on runway 24 right. The A345 has the big engines of the A346, but without the extra-long fuselage. Thai also brings A345's into LAX, on the next-longest flight, to Bangkok, which usually runs just a few minutes less than the flight to Singapore.

This is the only shot I've got of the Thai airbus; it arrives about 8:30 in the evening, and then leaves again a little after midnight - not the best times to attempt photos. The B747 at the gate next door is the China Airlines (callsign Dynasty) with the Boeing Dreamliner paint scheme.

No Pax - Boxes only:

There are a few destinations that are only served by cargo carriers: actual humans need not apply. Among these are Brussels; Luxembourg; Fort Worth, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; and Wilmington, Ohio.

Brussels and Luxembourg are both served by Cargolux, using B747-400's. You can tell that this is a factory-built freighter by the short hump: Passenger -400's have the longer hump that first appeared on the -300 model. The winglets are the clue that differentiate the -400's from the earlier models; so far as I know, no one has yet retrofitted winglets as they have on the B727's and B757's. We are starting to see former passenger -400's that have been converted to cargo use; Eva and World both bring in ex-passenger, now freighter -400's.


Most of the Fedex flights out of LAX go to Memphis, Indianapolis, or San Jose. But there's one that goes to Fort Worth's Alliance airport. All passenger service from here to the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex goes into DFW (thanks to the Wright Amendment, Southwest doesn't go from LA to Dallas Love - yet). This flight always seems to be in an Airbus A310, which is a shorter version of the A306. Fedex has both. When I was in Memphis, I referred to the A310's as "short buses", and everyone seemed to be clear about their traffic. Here's one of each.

The only flights from LA to Kentucky are for boxes only. UPS has their hub at Louisville's Standiford airport, served usually with B767-300's, although we do see B757's as well. Most UPS flights out of the LA area actually go from other airports, such as Long Beach and Ontario.

Airborne Express and DHL have combined forces, although you wouldn't know it to look at their fleet - we see at least three different paint jobs each day, and they don't all park in the same place, either. There are three different places at LAX where they park, and the three paint schemes don't necessarily correspond to the three ramps. Regardless of the color of the airplanes, they're the only way to Wilmington from here.

That's it for now; next time we'll look at jets versus props.