Strip Puzzler

I saw this strip yesterday, and happened to notice something interesting. Any guesses?

Flashback!

I was scrolling through my photo archive the other day, looking for the Southwest Triple Crown One shot I used earlier this week. Along the way, I started noticing pictures of aircraft and liveries that we don't see any longer at LAX, and that seemed worth sharing.

Don't see these guys at LAX anymore

It's been several years since we've had Aer Lingus at LAX

Shanghai Cargo merged into China Cargo last year

We still have American Eagle E140s, but I haven't seen this Make-A-Wish plane in years

Two superseded paint schemes. It's been a long time too since I've seen a Delta B767-400

The final Northwest livery, modeled here on a pair of B757s

We don't see Air India at LAX anymore

The Delta Song aircraft disappeared several years ago

The Prez comes to town

The president stopped by this afternoon for an appearance on the Tonight Show. It was a quick in-and-out again visit; I think he was on the ground for maybe two hours.

 

 

What was wrong with those photos

Although I couldn't definitely remember why I had selected those two photos as candidates for the What's wrong with this photo series, I figured that you guys would find something noteworthy about each. Which you did. Which, in turn, jogged my memory enough to compose this follow-up. I'll give you the first photo again here to save you having to go back to look at it:

What's happening here is that the Southwest on the left is entering the alley, while the one on the right is pushing off of gate one. That's obvious enough. What made it noteworthy though, is that the inbound aircraft is headed not for gate seven, the open gate off its right, but instead for gate three, which is now blocked by the pushing aircraft. As I recall, this was an error by the ground crew at gate one, who were supposed to wait for the airplane coming into gate three before starting their pushback. In the end, they pulled their plane back onto gate one so that the arrival could make it into gate three.

A few comments noted the tri-color tail on the aircraft parked at gate five. That's actually this airplane:

Triple Crown One

The second photo shows a DHL DC-8 just lifting off runway 25 right. We don't get DC-8s on a regular basis any more, but that airplane wasn't the anomaly in this shot - it was the Delta B757 on taxiway A in the background. There were some speculations that this was caused by the recent runway and taxiway closures, but in fact this Delta flight was a charter and was headed over to the Atlantic Aviation ramp. Here's another shot, showing another Delta aircraft on the Atlantic ramp: