Qantas A380 arrives

After years of anticipation, yesterday saw the arrival of the first Airbus A380 in regular scheduled service at LAX. Qantas flight 93 from Melbourne arrived a little before 7:30 in the morning. After unloading and servicing the aircraft, it was towed over to the Imperial Terminal on the south side of the field for some festivities. Also on hand for the show was John Travolta's B707, which is painted in the scheme of Qantas' first jetliner. As I had had the mid-shift that morning, I didn't stick around for all of the show-and-tell stuff. It was a gray and overcast morning, not ideal for pictures, but here are a few:

Gate 101 at the International Terminal is one of two at that terminal that have been reconfigured to accommodate the A380. Here, the tug is being hooked up for the final 100 feet or so to the gate. This is procedure is not limited to the big Airbus; most other heavies also get towed onto this gate, as they do for most other gates at LAX. There are, so far, four gates at LAX set up for the big Airbus: the two at the Tom Bradley International Terminal (TBIT), and another two out at the west remote gates. The remote gates are gates in name only - they're really nothing more than hardstands with jetways that lead down to bus stops. Passengers get bussed to and from the TBIT. The long-term plan is to add more gates to the west side of the TBIT. There's also talk that Virgin Atlantic wants to bring their A380's to terminal two or three.

John Travolta's B707. As you can tell from the lighting, I actually took this shot the evening before, while the airplane was still on Atlantic Aviation's ramp. Later, it was towed over to the Imperial Terminal ramp for the inaugural festivities.

In this shot, the A380 is now in position at gate 101, and unloading has begun. For a sense of scale, look at the ground crew and vehicles. That's a B767 in the alley.

The International Terminal, with Terminal Four in the foreground. The A380 is on the corner (gate 101); the other Qantas jet at gate 104 is a B747, which arrived a few minutes before the Airbus. You can just see the top of the tail of another Qantas B747 parked at gate 41. That American tail sticking up next to it is the B767 in the previous photo. On the opposite side is an MD80 at gate 40, and a B757 at gate 42A.

Another comparison shot, actually taken while the A380 was still being pulled onto the gate, shows an MD80 waiting to leave the alley. That tail on the far left is a B767.

Where can we go from here: Additions and Corrections

In an earlier entry, I mentioned several cities that only receive cargo flights from LAX. Since then, I've worked an overtime day shift during the week, and found a couple more:

Toledo, Ohio, is a cargo-only destination from LAX. The route is flown by Air Transport, using DC-8's. Flight time is about three and a half hours.

Another cargo flight to Brussels: Singapore Cargo lifts off from runway 25 right.

In the same posting about cargo operators, I mentioned that Fedex flies out of here to hubs in Memphis, Indianapolis, and San Jose. The first two are correct, but Fedex's west coast hub is actually in Oakland. Mea culpa. If you want to get to San Jose, you'll have lots of passenger options: American Eagle, Skywest, and Southwest all offer jet service from here to there (and back again). Flight times run from forty-five minutes to an hour. Skywest and Southwest also go into Oakland; those flights seem to run about fifty to fifty-five minutes.

In addition, I said that the Fedex flight to Fort Worth Alliance is usually done with an Airbus. So naturally, this week they had to do it with a DC-10:

A Fedex DC-10 departs off runway 25 left. On the parallel taxiway in the background is an Eva Cargo MD-11. The MD-11 was the follow-on model. Obvious differences are the MD-11's longer length and winglets. Less obvious in this picture is the MD-11's much better climb performance.

Speaking of DC-10s, a while back I mentioned former Northwest Airlines DC-10s that had been retired only to re-enter service with ATA for their military charters. Here are a couple of shots I discovered in a back corner of the iBook's hard drive:

As you can see, the transformations were not full-fledged makeovers.

One more ATA shot from the archives. ATA was the last scheduled US carrier to operate the Lockheed Tristar, my personal favorite of the first generation wide bodies. This was the last Tristar to show up here, sometime last year.

Where can we go from here: Props versus jets

Last time I discussed a few of the various destinations for flights out of LAX. This time we'll continue that theme with a look at destinations served by both jets and turboprops. As you might imagine, there are not that many places that have such dual service. JFK, for instance, currently does not have any scheduled turboprop service from LAX. All of these are cities served by one or more of the regional airlines operating at LAX: American Eagle (callsign: Eagle Flight), for American; Horizon, for Alaska; and Skywest, for United (primarily).

Boise, Idaho, can be reached from LA via Horizon's Dash 8, seen here in the foreground, or via Skywest's CRJ-200, in the background. The CRJ, while somewhat faster, also has less seating capacity: 50, versus around 70 for the Dash 8. Ironically, although they have different brand names (Canadair builds the CRJ's and de Havilland the Dash 8, which is officially the DHC-8), they're both built by the same parent company, Bombardier Aerospace of Canada, who also owns Learjet. Bombardier is better known to most Americans as the builder of Ski-Doo snowmobiles; producing snowcats and snowmobiles was how the company got its start in the 1930's. Just as the CRJ series was an outgrowth of the Challenger CL-60 business jet, the Dash 8 was a descendant of the Dash 7, which was in turn preceded by the de Havilland DHC-2 Twin Otter. Bombardier actually calls the turboprop the Q400, but you'll never hear pilots or controllers refer to it that way. The flight plan times are about 1:35 for the Skywest CRJ and 2 hours for the Horizon Dash 8. At LAX, the Horizon gates are a good deal closer to the preferred departure runway than are Skywest's.

Monterey, California, is another destination with turboprop and jet service from LA. In this case, American Eagle E135's and Skywest E120 Brasilias. Both of these aircraft are built by Brazil's Embraer, which has made itself a major player in the regional airliner market. The ERJ series is itself a development of the E120. The E135 is the smallest of the ERJ's, with a seating capacity of about three dozen; the Brasilia seats thirty. The jet is less than 15 minutes faster to Monterey than the turboprop; flight plan times are about 50 minutes and 1:04, respectively.


Another destination that offers a choice of jet or turboprop service also offers an additional choice of carrier: Reno, Nevada, can be reached from LAX via Horizon Dash 8, Skywest CRJ, or Southwest B737. The Skywest flight seems to be the shortest, by a whopping one minute. The CRJ's and 737's average just under an hour, while the Dash 8 takes about an hour and ten minutes.

San Diego and San Luis Obispo, California, offer not just a choice of jets or turboprops, but different models of turboprops as well. Skywest uses the Brasilia for these routes, but American Eagle uses E135's and Saab Fairchild 340's. Flight plan time for the Brasilia is about 25 minutes to San Diego. The jet is only a minute faster, but the Saab is about five minutes slower. I've mentioned before that the SF34 is the doggiest of all the aircraft regularly operating at LAX, and we controllers were encouraged by rumors that the Saabs were going to be phased out. If so, it hasn't happened yet (sigh). The E135 flight plans about a half hour to San Luis Obispo, the Brasilia about five or six minutes more. The Saab needs about forty-five minutes for the same flight.

On all of these routes, the jets are slightly faster, but what's not reflected is the greater fuel and maintenance requirements. That stuff doesn't show up in the flight plans, so I wasn't able to figure it in. Turboprops are generally more fuel efficient than jets, however, and don't have to climb as high to achieve efficiency. This plays in their favor, especially on short routes, as the airspace congestion in southern California often means that certain routes are held to pre-designated altitudes, regardless of what altitude the pilot files for. For instance, the San Diego flights are capped at nine thousand for the turboprops and eleven thousand for the jets. Below ten thousand, all aircraft are limited to 250 knots, and on these shorter routes there's just not much chance for the jets to go any faster.

On the other hand, the flying public has a definite preference for jets, even little ones, over prop-driven aircraft. The perception is that the prop aircraft are smaller, slower, bumpier, noisier, and more dangerous than the jets. I don't have any factual information to hand on whether any of these is in fact the case . . . but then neither does the flying public.

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.

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.

Flight One

This post was updated in January, 2011.

Airline flight numbers have become increasingly complicated as the industry has matured. Three-digit flight numbers are the norm, and many of the flights we see these days have four-digit flight numbers. A standard joke is that the FAA (or Union) has recently done a study that shows that five out of four pilots (or controllers) is dyslexic; these four-digit flight numbers seem to enhance that quality and even invite mangling. Skywest and the recently-departed Jetlink have been the leaders at LAX. A few recent Skywest examples: 6525, 6552, 6225, 6252. Also: 5548, 5484, 5448, 5844. Jetlinks were even worse, as they used flights in the 7600s, 7700's, and 7800s. Sixes and sevens, although not looking anything alike, have a mysterious tendency to get interchanged when being spoken. Maybe it's the alliterative quality, but it doesn't happen near as much with fours and fives.

The hub-and-spoke scheduling system, combined with regional airline partners, is probably to blame for the increased complexity. A lot of routes are out-and-back flights, with alternating even/odd flight numbers; for instance Continental's service between IAH and LAX: flights into LAX are odd numbered (495, 595, 795), while the return flights are even (394, 594, 794). It is quite possible to have both on frequency at once, as one arrives and the other departs. When this happens, the opportunity for pilot or controller discombobulation escalates: It regularly happens that the pilot of one will answer radio calls for the other. A couple of variations: Numbers using fifty and sixty, which sound an awful lot alike on our low-fidelity radios. A particularly flagrant example, again from Skywest: 5516 and 6516, closely followed by 5512 and 6512. These two pairs show up around the crack of dawn most mornings, when nobody is at their best: The controllers are struggling to the end of their mid-shift, while the pilots aren't really even awake yet.

The other variation is numbers such as 69 and 169. WARNING - Old war story coming up! I actually saw a close call created by the confusion created between two United aircraft using these flight numbers: One took the clearance meant for the other, and the mistake didn't become apparent until it was about a mile from landing on the wrong runway - which was already occupied with a 747 waiting to depart AND two other aircraft crossing downfield. It was fairly late one night a few years ago, and I was the tower controller for the south side of the airport (runways 25 left and right). Arrivals were being sent to both runways, and there was a steady flow of departures as well. United 69 was assigned runway 25 right, and landed without incident. About ten or twelve miles behind was United 169, who was assigned runway 25 left. His data tag said runway 25 left, and I cleared him to land on runway 25 left. Meanwhile I had a Qantas 747 line up on runway 25 right, holding for departure while a couple of previous 25 left arrivals crossed the runway enroute to their gates. It was already a bit of a squeeze play, as I had to fit my Qantas in between two other aircraft departing from the north complex - and that controller had arrivals for both of his runways as well. In addition, I had to get my arrivals across the inboard runway so that there would be room for the next arrivals to exit their runway (as I mentioned, this was several years ago - before the space between the south side runways was widened and the center taxiway developed - there wasn't much room between the runways, and the Local controller had to be careful about not accumulating aircraft between the runways, lest subsequent arrivals have no where to get off). Anyway, I was closely monitoring the progress of my crossing aircraft on the ground radar (remember - it was about ten or eleven o'clock at night) so I could get Qantas rolling when suddenly the runway hold bars went up on 25 right. The ground radar in the tower cab, one of the main functions of which is to prevent runway incursions, is tied into the approach radar and projects what runway an aircraft is about to land on (or depart from). When it projects a landing or departing aircraft, bright hold bars are illuminated across every intersection on the display for that particular runway. These were what made me realize that United 169 was on short final for runway 25 RIGHT - not 25 left as he was supposed to be. The runways are so close together (even now) that the system only works about thirty seconds into the future; it was too late for him to move over to the correct runway, so I had to send him around. He went a few hundred feet over the top of the waiting 747 as the runway occupied alert message blared in the tower cab - a guaranteed way to make sure all eyes are looking at you!

Yet another version of callsign confusion occurs when two airlines show up at about the same time with the same flight number. This happens surprisingly often at LAX, which is served by at least fifty airlines - and several of them operate hubs here. A current example that comes to mind is United 58 and AirTran (callsign: Citrus) 58, both scheduled departures about ten minutes apart. This wasn't that big a deal until a week ago, when AirTran moved from Terminal 3 (on the north side) to Terminal 6 (on the south side, and shared with United to boot). At someplace busy like LAX this is almost unavoidable, although we do work with the airlines to change conflicting flight numbers (and thus creating flight peculiar numbers such as Skywest 16A - the new flight number for what used to be the Skywest 6516 mentioned above - but hey, it works!).

None of that, nifty though it may be, is what I meant for this column to be about: the other end of the numerical range - specifically ONE. Many airports don't have any flight ones - I don't recall any from any of my previous duty stations (MLU, MSY, MEM), and Air Force One doesn't count. Here at LAX, however, we've got at least seven flights numbered one. As I discussed above, all of these operate in the opposite direction as flight two. Most are international, but not all:

American One (AAL1) from JFK arrives at LAX around 11am, usually in a B767-200. The B762 is the shortest of the 767 variants; that's a UPS B767-300 (B763) on the parallel taxiway.

Air New Zealand One arrives in L.A. from London around 6pm, then continues on to Auckland, leaving here at 11pm. It's a 12-hour flight from L.A. to New Zealand in the B747-400. As you can see from the shadows, this is not actually ANZ1 in the photo - but you get the idea. The scheduling of several of these flights is not conducive to photography.

Eva One (EVA01) originates in L.A. and leaves for Taipei at 1:30 in the morning for the 13-hour flight. Eva used to fly a B747-400 (B744) on this route, but now they use the B777-300 (B773 or B77W). The B744's are now showing up as freighters. Above, the standard Eva paint scheme, with a Skywest CRJ7 about to touch down on runway 24 left. Below, the special 777-300ER (for which Eva was the launch customer) scheme. Contrast the Eva 777-300 with the shorter Korean 777-200 behind it.


The other domestic (if you can call it that) flight one is Hawaiian One (HAL1, although for a short time it was inexplicably HAL0001) from Los Angeles to Honolulu: A 5-hour flight that leaves at nine in the morning. When I first got to LAX, Hawaiian used cantankerous DC-10's on this route; thankfully those are all gone in favor of the B763's, although rumor has it that Hawaiian is planning on moving to Airbuses (ugh!). On the parallel taxiway is a Midwest (callsign: Midex) B717, which is the last vestige of the DC-9 series; a shortened MD-90, it was to be the MD-95 before Boeing bought out McDonnell-Douglas. They were built here in Douglas's now-extinct Long Beach factory, which has since made way for a huge condo development right on the edge of the Long Beach airport - not a stellar example of compatible airport or urban planning. Update: As was rumored, Hawaiian has now added A332s to the fleet; meanwhile Midex is no more.
Korean One (KAL001) arrives around 8:30 am from Tokyo, usually in a B777-200, as seen here, although I have seen B773's used as well, and occasionally a B744.

Northwest One (NWA1) leaves LAX at 1:30 pm for Tokyo, flight time about ten hours. The same plane will have arrived mid-morning as the return flight, Northwest Two. Northwest was the last to upgrade to the 747-400's on this route; when I started at LAX in 2002, they were still using 747-200's - which everyone else had already retired or converted to freighters. Northwest still uses B742's as freighters, although I've seen a couple leave here on their way to the bone yard. Northwest was also the last major carrier to use DC-10's in passenger service - even after Hawaiian had got rid of theirs. I saw Northwest DC-10's in Memphis as late as 2006, where they were used on the Amsterdam flight. They've now been replaced with Airbus 330's. Those Northwest DC-10's were so beat that I think Fedex didn't even want them - and yet they showed up again here at LAX last year, flying for ATA (Amtran) on military contracts. It was the loss of those contracts that doomed ATA overnight - literally. In the picture above, from about a year ago, the Airbus 380 can be seen in the background, arriving for a promotional visit. This shot is one of the few I took with a telephoto lens on the old Olympus camera. I used it only a day or two before quitting it - look at the optical distortion and lack of clarity. I've since upgraded to a Panasonic Lumix which has a Leica lens. The picture below wasn't taken with it though - but it does show a Delta 767-400 in the foreground; compare with the B762 and B763 shown earlier. By comparing the shadows of the wings, you can see that not just the fuselage of the -400 is longer; the wingspan is greater as well. Delta used to operate all three versions of the 767, but the -200's were all parked a couple of years ago in a fleet simplification plan. The only other carrier I know of that has all three versions of the 767 is Continental, and they don't bring any of them here too often. Update: We lost NWA1 when Northwest became part of Delta. The Narita route still operates as DAL283/DAL284, either as a B744 or an A332. The Northwest Cargo operation was another casualty of the Delta merger.

Last and least, well least-performing and least-liked at LAX anyhow, is Air Tahiti One (THT001). This flight leaves L.A. at one in the afternoon on an eight-hour flight to Tahiti in the Airbus 340-300. Curiously, Air France flies the same route, also using the A343, which is a slow-climbing dog regardless of whose paint it carries, although the Tahitis seem to be the worst. So bad, in fact, that departure control will sometimes call and stop departures when Tahiti gets airborne. A common trap for new controllers at LAX is launching the next departure too soon behind an A343 - allowing for wake turbulence separation isn't enough; you gotta give it a serious head start to prevent the next plane from catching up. This shot actually shows them in the flare over runway 24 left; that's an All Nippon (ANA) B773 in the Star Alliance paint scheme waiting for departure. Update: While Tahiti still operates this flight with A343s, Air France now uses B772s. No more Air France Airbuses at LAX!



Update: While we lost NWA1, we now have V Australia 1. VAU1 is flown with a B777-300 from Sydney, arriving shortly after sun up after some thirteen hours in the air.