Showing posts with label B747-400. Show all posts
Showing posts with label B747-400. Show all posts

Friday, April 20, 2018

Photo Friday: Qantas Boeings


This weeks' edition of Photo Friday features a pair of Qantas Boeings. A B787-9, freshly-arrived from Melbourne, waits as a B747-400 departs from Runway 24 Left enroute to New York JFK.



Bonus shot: The next Runway 24 Right arrival was this Delta B767-300:


Sunday, March 29, 2015

KLM refresh


A recent reader comment alerted me to the LAX debut of KLM's revised livery. I have to admit that when I first saw it, I thought that I'd gotten the wrong day, as the new paint scheme isn't dramatically different from the old scheme. As a refresher, the opening shot shows a recent arrival of the old livery. The following shots all feature the new:






Friday, January 2, 2015

Happy New Year!


Welcome to 2015! I'll start the new year off with a collection of noteworthy heavy jet shots taken over the holidays. These first don't seem so notable at first, until you consider that we hardly ever get Delta or United B747s at LAX anymore. These two both showed up and then left again on the same day.




KLM still brings in a daily B747. This one is marked to commemorate their 95th anniversary:


Next, the latest carrier to replace their B747s at LAX with B777s:

China Airlines (callsign: Dynasty) has recently started operating B777s between LAX and Taipei


Air Canada's Rouge normally operates A319s at LAX, but during the holiday season they've also shown up in a B767:

Besides the Rouge B767, also notable in this shot is the TACA Airbus; we don't see this livery at LAX much anymore; most of the TACA aircraft we see now bear the new Avianca paint scheme

Gratuitous dragon photo:


Saturday, November 15, 2014

Bye-bye birdie?


Thai Airways has a limited presence at LAX, namely four weekly B777 flights to Seoul, South Korea. Formerly, there had been a non-stop flight to Bangkok in an A340-500, which at the time was one of the longest scheduled airline flights in the world: Sixteen to eighteen hours in the air. That flight was discontinued in 2012, and marked the departure of half of the A340-500 operations* at LAX. The replacement flight to Seoul does continue on to Bangkok, and has recently been upgraded from a B777-200ER to a B777-300ER. There has been talk of Thai bringing an A380 to LAX, but so far all I've heard is talk.

Something that has not been a regular sight at LAX is a B744 in Thai colors. We had one pass through a couple of weeks ago, though -- on its way to Mohave. Mohave is one of the places where airliners get parked; Victorville, California, is another. There are also several locations in Arizona where airlines and leasing companies store aircraft. Is this aircraft going into storage? I don't know; there's not much information on the web about Thai retiring its B744s, although some other types are known to be on the way out and many other airlines are parking their B747-400s. Since most of the airports that host parked airliners also offer heavy maintenance facilities, it could be that this airplane will return to the skies in the not-too-distant future.

Besides this Thai B744, I've also recently seen an Air New Zealand B744 and a KLM MD-11 pass through LAX on their way to the desert.


* - The other A345 user at LAX was Singapore, who flew theirs non-stop to Singapore, a similarly long (16-17 hours) flight that has since been discontinued in favor of a flight to Tokyo that then continues on to Singapore. We no longer see A345s on a regular basis at LAX; both Singapore and Thai have dropped the type from their fleets. Etihad brought one in during their first weeks of operation here earlier this summer, but they now use B777s.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

And now, for more sport


I've been wanting to catch the Qantas World Cup B747 for some time now, so even though it was really hazy last week, I grabbed this photo from the catwalk. I believe the Virgin America Airbus in the lower shot is the same one that sported a mustache last season: