New box hauler

LAX has seen the addition of a handful of new cargo operators this year. This happens to be one of them. Qatar Cargo (callsign: Qatari) passes through LAX while on the way between Liege, Belgium, and Mexico City.

 

American Eagle changes at LAX

Lots of you guys caught the appearance of SkyWest in American Eagle colors last week. I haven't yet taken any better shots, so here's the other side of that plane:

As several of you mentioned in the comments, AMR, the parent company of American Airlines and American Eagle Airlines, has chosen to use 50-seat SkyWest CRJ200s at LAX in place of the 44-seat American Eagle E140s. The larger American Eagle CRJ700s will continue to be operated by American Eagle Airlines. The American Eagle Airlines crew base at LAX will also be closed at the end of the month; American Eagle CRJ7s will have crews from the Chicago base. These changes have been brought about, at least in part, by a bankruptcy judge throwing out an American Airlines pilot contract provision that limited American's use of regional jets.

Following this story is made more complicated by the fact that "American Eagle" is the brand name for American Airlines' commuter/feeder service as well as the company name for the AMR-owned regional airline that has been providing most of that service. American Eagle Airlines (callsign: Eagle Flight) is expected to adopt a new company name next year, which may make it a bit easier to keep track. In the future, American Eagle will be the marketing brand for American's regional feeder service, regardless of which contractor is providing the service (be it Eagle Flight, SkyWest, Mesa, etc.)

AMR has moved the E140s to DFW; we saw a number of them ferried out late the eve of the change-over on November 14th. These shots are of the last before-dark E140 arrival at LAX:

An unexpected discovery was the white tail on this E140. Shots taken on November 14th - the last day of American Eagle E140 operations at LAX

Here are a couple of better E140 shots, taken a few weeks earlier:

References:

AINonline:  SkyWest to fly as American Eagle

Dallas Morning News:  SkyWest signs on with American Airlines

Dallas Morning News:  Garton talks about SkyWest

Flight Global Airline Business blog:  SkyWest's quiet takeover of LAX

 

Sports fans

Some of you may have heard about a little sporting event coming up this weekend in Tampa, Florida. Featuring the Arizona Cardinals versus the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Superbowl is the biggest thing in American football. We see some sports-theme paint jobs pass through LAX, along with various visiting teams. Most of this has nothing whatever to do with the Superbowl, but then I'm not a football fan:

The favorites this year are the Pittsburgh Steelers. We have several Steelers fans in the tower, and they can't seem to let us forget it.
I apologize for the quality of this shot, but this was the one and only time I've ever seen this airplane in LA.

This US Airways Airbus sports the logo of the Arizona Cardinals, the underdogs in this year's Superbowl. Out of sheer contrariness, I hope they kick @$$!

The Philadelphia Eagles lost out to the Cardinals this year.
The Steelers beat somebody else, but I don't have a picture of an aircraft featuring that team's logo.

The sports motif isn't limited to football.

Nor is it limited to professional sports. (Is there a Texas A&M plane? I haven't seen or heard of one, but then Aggies in airplanes . . . )

Where can we go from here: State Capitals

Time for the oft-promised and delayed continuation of the "Where can we go from here" series. This time, I'm going to take a look at who goes to which of the state capital cities. Service to the state capitals is hampered by the fact that many states' capitals are not located in one of their larger cities. In fact, some of them are in cities which are for the most part unknown to non-residents. As examples, I'll cite Frankfurt, Kentucky; Jefferson City, Missouri; and Carson City, Nevada. Shockingly, there is no direct service from LAX to any of these. In fact, this has almost become a study of "Where we can't go from here: State Capitals"; of the fifty state capitals, only thirteen can be reached non-stop from LAX.

Phoenix, Arizona, is one of the better-served state capitals. Southwest, United, and US Air (nee America West) all operate regular flights to and from Phoenix. The United and US Air flights are often flown by their regional partner airlines, Skywest and Mesa, respectively. The US Air service was flown by America West prior to their merger earlier this year. The flight usually runs just under an hour. Because Phoenix is so close nearby (in jet terms) and pretty busy (it's a US Air hub, and Southwest has a strong presence there too), there is often a flow control program for aircraft going there: we have to call and get a "wheels up" time for each of our Phoenix departures to ensure that there's a hole in the line for them. This rarely delays them more than fifteen minutes (and there's an incentive for us to keep the delays at less than fifteen minutes: beyond that they become 'countable' delays).
A pair of Mesa (callsign: Air Shuttle) CRJ's. Above is a CRJ-900 at gate 10 next to a B737-300. Below, a CRJ-200 pulls into gate 6 with an A321 next door.

Sacramento, California, currently home of the "governator", is also about an hour away, but there's never any difficulty with traffic restrictions. Skywest flies the route for United, using CRJ's. Southwest also goes into Sacramento from LA. You'll see Skywest RJ's later on.

Denver, Colorado, gets great service from LAX: We have four airlines that go there on a regular basis. Frontier and United both operate hubs in Denver; I've seen just about every type United operates on this route. At the moment, Denver is the only direct destination for Frontier out of LA. American and Southwest also offer service into Denver. Flight time runs 1:45 to two hours.

Atlanta, Georgia, being the busiest airport in the country, not to mention the home of Delta, gets regular service from LA. Besides Delta, AirTran also flies from here to their hub in Atlanta. Flight times are four hours or a little less. Delta has run nearly everything on this route, but AirTran only uses their B737's; I don't think the B717's have enough range and payload to make it worthwhile. When AirTran first started flying into LAX all they had were the B717's, and they went from here to DFW. The non-stop to Atlanta came later, when they got their B737's. For a short time, until they got the 737's, AirTran contracted with Ryan Air to fly the route for them, using Airbus A320's. I wish I'd gotten a picture of one of those, since they've long since gone elsewhere and been repainted.

Honolulu, Hawaii, is served by the widest range of airlines from LA: Six different airlines fly this route, and each of them a couple of times a day. American, Continental, Delta, Hawaiian, Northwest, and United all currently use B757's and B767's. Not surprisingly, flight times are all about the same, at around five hours and fifteen minutes. I can remember when Hawaiian used DC10's and Amtran used Tristars, but no more.

After Honolulu, it's not nearly as exciting to talk about Boise, Idaho. It's not as exciting to go there either: From LAX, you've a choice of Horizon's Dash 8's or Skywest's CRJ-200's. Horizon flies for Alaska out of LAX, and their flight time for this route is right around two hours. The Skywest CRJ's fly for United, and they're about twenty minutes quicker.

Indianapolis, Indiana, gets passenger service from Northwest and cargo service from Fedex. Either way, the flight takes about three and a half hours. During the summer a couple of other airlines also went from here to Indy; maybe again next summer? We can only hope.

Boston, Massachusetts, my mother's home town, gets several flights a day via American and United. Flight times hover around five hours. Boeings predominate on this route, although I have seen United slip in an Airbus from time to time.

A pair of heavy Boeings: An American B767-200 and a United B767-300.

Although it's not easy to see, the -300 is longer; compare the distance from the nose wheel to the wing root.

St. Paul, Minnesota, gets regular service thanks to sharing the airport with its neighbor Minneapolis. Northwest has their big hub there, and I've seen them use short Airbuses, B747's, and everything in between. Sun Country also goes from here to MSP, using B737's. Flights run around three hours, give or take.

United offers service into Oklahoma City's Will Rogers World Airport using Skywest CRJ-700's. Flight time is about two and a half hours. Come to think of it, I haven't noticed this flight go out within the last week or two, but I'm including it here anyway.

Nashville, Tennessee, is served by both American and Southwest. Both use B737's and have flight times around three and a half hours. Amazingly, I don't seem to have a picture of SWA and AAL B737's together; gotta work on that.

Austin, Texas, gets flights from American, Southwest, and United. American uses MD80's while Skywest operates CRJ-700's for United. Flights run about two and a half hours.

Salt Lake City, Utah, is a Delta hub, but also gets service from Southwest and United. Skywest flies the United flights using CRJ-200's and CRJ-700's. Oddly enough, Skywest also operates Delta Connection flights to SLC out of LAX. This creates the paradox of having two Skywest flights with different parent airlines' paint schemes going to the same place at about the same time. New ground controllers at LAX sometimes get surprised by the Skywest that doesn't park where all the other Skywests do. After a couple of times they figure it out (usually) because the flights operating for Delta, besides being painted in Delta colors, also have a different range of flight numbers (the Delta Skywests are usually in the 4000's, while the United Skywests are usually 5000's and 6000's. Usually). Another clue is that the Delta Skywest is often in a CRJ-900; Skywest doesn't operate -900's for United at LAX.

It figures - after all that blah about the Delta Skywests often being CRJ-900's, all I have is a picture of one that's in a -700. The -900 is longer, and can be identified by the two emergency exits over the wing; the -700 only has one; check the -900 in the first Phoenix photo above.

As I mentioned in the opening, this has become just as much a study of where you can't go from here: I counted eighteen states that receive no direct flights from LA at all. I'm not going to make a list of them here; I've been trying to avoid this whole topic becoming one great big list. A US map showing the affected states would've been nice, but the idea just occurred to me and it's already taken a week to put this together. For that same reason, most of the photos will have to go without captions - just imagine that each one has its own pithy remarks. For added interest, you can read this entry again tomorrow and imagine new pithy remarks!

Recent Happenings

I apologize for the dearth of recent entries; traffic's been slow and we're having a resurgence of summer temperatures; the two combined have pretty much sapped my inspiration.

There has been a bit of recent aviation news. The first item comes from Allentown, PA, where a Mesa airlines CRJ700, operating for United, narrowly missed a Cessna that had just landed but missed its assigned exit. The controller apparently didn't hear the Cessna pilot say that he had missed his exit and was going to take the next one, and cleared the RJ for takeoff. After starting their departure roll, the RJ pilots saw the Cessna and aborted - from 120 knots. Reports are that the aircraft missed each other by about ten feet. There were no injuries reported, but the Mesa flight was cancelled. NATCA, the controllers' union, claims that the two controllers on duty were both trainees, with no 'adult' supervision. While this sounds unlikely to me, I'll concede the possibility. The timing was great for NATCA though, as the House Aviation Subcommittee was scheduled to meet two days later - to discuss runway safety. NATCA has maintained for some time now that the nation has been facing a growing controller shortage, and (naturally) lays the blame on FAA managements' ineptitude.

We don't have Mesa flying for United here at LAX, although they do operate here for USAir. Instead, the United RJ's at LAX are operated by Skywest, and here are a few photos:

We rarely have Cessnas at LAX, so to give you some idea of the size difference, here's a shot of one at a local general aviation airport.

The congress has passed a bill last week that allows the FAA to continue to operate in the absence of an actual budget. Thanks to the very muddled budget process for the last couple of years, the FAA has actually been operating under various continuing resolutions that allow the agency to keep going under the assumption that funding will be unchanged from what was last approved. This process has been rather frustrating for NATCA, who has been trying to get congress to force a change in the FAA's current way of dealing with controllers (just a quick recap: the nation's air traffic controllers have been working without a contract under imposed work rules since summer of 2006). The preferred way to make this happen is to attach an amendment to the FAA budget or some other 'must pass' legislation. The continuing resolutions have so far made this an ineffectual strategy. Meanwhile, AOPA, the aircraft owners and pilots association, has declared the current funding bill as a temporary victory in their on-going fight against user fees.

Three airlines operating at LAX are each receiving $600,000 grants to install safety equipment that will provide pilots with their location on the airport and alert them when they're about to enter or cross a runway. Southwest, Skywest, and US Airways will each install the equipment in 20 aircraft by next May as part of a study on the system's effectiveness. An FAA study indicated that over 40% of nation-wide pilot-error runway incursions between 2004 and 2008 could have been prevented by this equipment.

A pair of SWA B737's. The blue one is a 737-500, while the brown one is a -700.
The irony here is that the new paint scheme is on the old airplane.

A Southwest 737-300 departs runway 24 left in the background, and a Westjet 737-700 taxis in the foreground. Sandwiched in between is a US Air A321 - easily mistaken for a B757.

A US Air comparison shot: a B737 in the foreground and an Airbus A320 in the background. New controllers often have a hard time distinguishing the A320-series aircraft from the B737's. This photo is one I use to help my trainees learn to recognize some of the differences. In particular, look at the shapes of the tail cones and the noses. Winglets are another clue: the Airbuses all have vestigial winglets, while the Boeings either have none at all or great big ones;
look at the winglets on the Westjet and brown Southwest above.

Lots of Southwests and US Airs: LAX Terminal One, as seen from the tower.

A pair of Skywests: A CRJ-200 in the new United colors takes the runway. while an E-120 Brasilia in Skywest's own markings waits its turn.

Scheduled A380 flights at LAX will begin next month when Qantas initiates A380 service from the Tom Bradley International Terminal on October 20th. We're also supposed to get Emirates in October, although I've heard that they're going to initiate service to Dubai using B777's.