Airport

We took last week off from work and checked out sights and shopping venues around Southern California. One of our trips included an overnight stay in Los Angeles.

Back in 1976 I took a semester off from school and took a job with Rockwell International ("Where Science Gets Down to Business"). An alumnus from New Mexico Tech was working there and told the head of the Computer Science department they wanted to hire an intern. They recommended me and I was happy to take a break from school.

I had no idea what the job was until I got there. It was in a department that did programming for the B-1 Bomber. I didn't make any real contributions to the program so I'm not really a baby killer. I was just a gofer. But that's what interns often are. I went back in June, 1977, for a second stint but got laid off the day after Jimmy Carter canceled the bomber's development.

Rockwell's plant was on the southeast corner of the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). They had bleachers set up at the north edge of the property for us to sit on and watch the activity of the airport. As you can see from my map I lived and worked very near the airport activity. As if that weren't enough I would watch the planes from other spots around the airport.

The constant stream of planes coming and going at this airport has been calling me to make time-lapse videos. Since we were spending the night in the area I finally had the opportunity.

I set up the camera at one of my old plane watching spots (shown in my map to the south of the airport). That location gives you a good view of the planes as they line up to land. You can see their approach especially well in the evening with their landing lights shining out from the darkness. I filmed the activity from 8:30pm until 10:00pm. I shot this at six-second intervals and play them back at 15 frames per second. The hour and a half flies by in just a minute.

There are two streams of planes coming in. One lands on the southernmost runway and the other lands on a northern runway. The departing planes leave mostly from the other two runways. We can't see much of the departing flights in this video. There are occasional flashes of their lights at the left edge but they come and go in only one frame so there's no motion.



The movie starts while the sky is still blue then goes gray. For your comfort and convenience, here's the first frame of the movie in its full technicolor glory.

Planes are magical. Too bad the terrorists have won and flying is a pain in the butt.