Tunisia Trip Day 11

Travel day back to LAX via CDG/Paris. No Roman ruins but lots of airplane pics.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had to leave the hotel at 4:30am. Originally I was going to take a taxi but our driver said he would take me since the airport transfer was part of the tour package. When we arrived at the hotel last night, he then said a "friend" would pick me up. Are you sure? No problem! So at 4:30am, another driver shows up and asks me for the transfer form or something; he didn't speak English. I said I don't have anything, he hesitated, then took me to the airport anyway, with a busted seatbelt in the passenger seat. At the airport, he followed me around, trying to show me where to go. I was trying to explain that I've been to many airports and I'll be fine, but he waited until I got my boarding pass, then asked for money. Sigh. The smallest I had was 10 dinar so I gave him that. I paid for the ride beforehand, gave our regular driver a large tip, and I'm still being nickeled and dimed. It's like the scamming employees at the Bardo Museum.

Same thing for the Tunisian government. They just implemented an exit tax effective 10/1/2014 of 30 dinars. Welcome to Tunisia... now you need to pay for us to let you go home. I had to find a bank counter at the airport to buy the exit stamp to stick in my passport. I did this but when I went through security at the airport, the border guy was complaining about the stamp in French. I gave him a blank look so after a few moments, he looked at me like I was an idiot, then dismissed me. Huh? Later I find out that since I arrived on 9/30/2014, I didn't have to pay the exit tax. Whatever. Just let me go home.

Finally, since I'm complaining, Air France sucks. When I bought the tickets originally, I purchased premium economy seats thinking that I would be able to pre-select (aisle) seats, but that wasn't the case. After much complaining on Twitter, they were suddenly able to assign me a window seat from LAX-CDG, which I was then able to change online. Cool... not. Then Air France pilots go on strike for two weeks, fortunately ending the day before I was to leave. I was able to get to Paris but the flight arrived late so I had to run like crazy through CDG airport to make my connection though my luggage did not. At Tunis, my bag made it on a later flight but I had to go back to the airport to get it myself as they did not deliver. I wonder if they treat first class customers the same way. On the way back home, I tried for two days to check-in online but it would only process the TUN-CDG flight; the website said I was on standby for the CDG-LAX flight. WUWT?! I tried a direct Twitter message and a phone call to the AF US customer service number but both were unable (or unwilling) to do anything. At Tunis airport, the gate agent said that I had to check with a customer service agent in Paris for seats. When I arrived at CDG, the only seat available was a window seat. Arg, I paid AF $1700 four months before the trip! Frustrating. I'm never ever flying Air France again. I hope I can at least trade my miles from this trip for some useful stuff.

/rant


Carthage-Tunis Airport sunrise


CDG airport was pretty nice. There were a lot of shops and everything was clean though expensive. I bought a bottle of French wine at the duty free shop. They also had these "billboards" but with live plants.


Vietnamese Airlines Boeing 777-200ER. Never seen one at LAX.


British Aerospace 146 (Avro RJ85)


Air France Airbus A380-800. This is the same type of plane for my LAX-CDG trip. Very large plane.


Air France Boeing 777-300ER. This was my ride home. Unlike the A380, the interior was a bit worn. The in-flight entertainment system stopped working for me and my neighbor about an hour into the flight. Fortunately, there was an empty seat but it had a broken leg rest (thus unoccupied). I ended up sitting there for most of the 11.5 hour flight since I couldn't deal with my window seat. Also, the food seems to be worse than the A380 as well. More importantly, the premium economy seats were similar and both sucked.


Entry and exit stamps... and the 30 dinar exit tax stamp that I didn't have to buy

Back to sleep!

JWA Parking

I parked my car at the off-site lot at John Wayne Airport for ~5 days and the total cost was $70 ($14/day). A taxi ride from my house in Orange to the airport would have been about $36 each way so it was a wash. Unlike at LAX, there are not that many options for off-site parking so it's fairly expensive.

The only bonus was the lot is directly below the landing flight path. I caught a Southwest flight coming in for a landing while walking to my car.

Flying Fish

Salmon...



and Orcas

Go Wong Wei

So I was at Imperial Hill taking some photos today and saw a Singapore Airlines A380 pull out of a gate at TBIT and head towards the north runway. Out of nowhere, an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 turned into the same jetway, blocking the A380. All sorts of funny Asian names popped up in my head but I'm not posting any of it, because that would be racist or something.

The Asiana 777 pulled into a gate so disaster averted.

United Airlines Boeing 787

United Airlines took delivery of a Boeing 787 in late July with tail number N20904. From FlightAware, it looks like the plane flies between Houston/Chicago and Houston/Los Angeles each day, with LAX arrival at ~5:30pm. I need to go out to Imperial Hill to get a photo. Departure is around 8:00pm so I won't be able to get a take-off photo during the winter.

I have some UA miles and I hardly ever fly United. Maybe I can use it to fly to Houston on the 787, though I think I only have enough miles to fly one-way.

777 x7

I went to Imperial Hill again before work and took some more pictures. There was a lot more people today versus last Sunday. Usually I see a lot of small planes but today, there were lots of Boeing 777s.


Emirates


United Airlines with Star Alliance livery


American Airlines


El Al... this is the first time I saw an El Al plane in person


Air China


Malaysian Airlines


Air New Zealand

Actually, I was hoping to see this paint job... I'm planning a trip to Asia this fall and flying EVA Air to Taipei is one of my options!

More Imperial Hill

Since I had to stop by work this afternoon (Sunday), I decided to go to Imperial Hill in El Segundo to look at planes for awhile. I brought my Sony a55 + the Tamron 75-300mm zoom lens. The lens is not all that great; at full zoom, it can only shoot down to f/5.6. Still, I think it's a wider than my 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 lens that costs ~3x as much.

None of the photos are all that exciting or even new. Here are some of the better ones:


British Airways 747 - I saw this take off as soon as I got out of my car.


Quickly followed by this Polar Air 747. It's a cargo freighter and by the new paingjob, it looks like Polar was recently acquired by DHL.


Since Terminal 1 is on the other side of the airport, hardly any Southwest flights use the south runway.


The Southwest flight was quickly followed by an U.S. Airways flight which also typically land on the north runways.


Smoggy wide-angle view of LAX


This plane landed on the other side of the airport and taxied over to the south side. I couldn't tell what it was from far away but through the camera, I saw the SkyTeam markings. It wasn't until I review the photo that I saw the small China Southern markings.


Take off next to LAX control tower


There sure are a lot of Alaska Airlines flights in/out of LAX


Air France Boeing 777


Lufthansa (or as Leon calls them, Luftwaffe) Airbus A340

iPhone Camera Zoom

I was standing on Imperial Hill on Wednesday waiting to pick up Leon; he was coming in from Munich on a Lufthansa flight. I didn't have my real camera so I had to use my iPhone.

Using Camera+ app, here is 1.0x (no zoom):



The A340 is the big white plane in the center. The EXIF data says 3.85mm (wide!) at f/2.8. I then zoomed in all the way (6.0x) and here's the result:



Weird. It almost looks like I added a film grain effect. The EXIF data is the same as above so it's definitely a digital zoom; there are no moving parts in the lens assembly.



Photo of approximately the same area using my Sony A55 (240mm at f/6.3).

AS514 - Frameographer

Since I was crammed into a window seat, I may as well make a movie.



Not sure where this was but probably started somewhere over Oregon and stopped somewhere over California. Sometimes there would be a strange wavy effect on the iPhone screen but everything looked normal with the naked eye.

Total frames = 2030
Capture @1fps
Playback @15fps

AS514

To save a vacation day, my sister dropped me off at Sea-Tac Airport instead of driving all the way back to Portland and flying back tomorrow. It was a full flight and the flight was full of kids. It's Spring Break season and lots of families are going to Disneyland. The flight was also very bumpy; we were flying from one pocket of turbulence to another for almost the entire trip.


Flight path for the last part of the flight (from FlightAware). I thought he made the last turn earlier than usual.


View as we flew over the coastline near Ventura


It's hard to tell because of the clouds but we were probably somewhere over the channel that separates Catalina Island from the mainland


Somewhere near Huntington Beach


Final turn before landing... I think I can see my house (not really)

Airliners.net

I uploaded a photo to Airlines.net a few days ago. They have lots of great photos of just about every airplane. I found out after uploading that all photo submissions are moderated which keeps out the crappy or mundane shots... I have lots of those. :)

My photo is still stuck in the moderation queue. It's probably the most unique shot I have so hopefully it gets posted.


Singapore Airlines A-380 landing at LAX

Air China 983

Air China Boeing 747 (flight 983) from Beijing landing at LAX on Sunday. About 8 months ago I picked up Sindy from this flight. It was her third and probably final trip to LA.

More Airplanes

Uh-oh, I think I'm addicted. I didn't have anything planned after church today so I went back to El Segundo to take more photos. This time I used the Tamron 70-300mm zoom lens that I bought for our older Sony a100 DSLR. At full zoom, the lens has an aperture of f/5.6, which is slightly better than my Sony lens: f/6.3 at 250mm max zoom. Similar to Friday afternoon, there were lots of people hanging out on Imperial Hill. This time it seems like there were more plane-spotters than photographers.

Since Imperial Hill is on the south side of LAX, the planes taking-off and landing are primarily from terminals 4 through 7. That is why most of the photos have planes from American (terminal 4), Delta (terminal 5), and United (terminals 6 and 7). Also, planes using the southern gates at TBIT (international terminal) also use runways 7/25.



Some interesting planes I saw today (not going to post all the 737s and 757s):


Frontier 414 LAX-DEN (Airbus A319-111)
Is that an otter on the tailfin?!


Skywest 6372 LAX-SBA (Embraer EMB-120ER)
This plane was busy today too: Palm Springs - LAX - Palm Springs - LAX - Santa Barbara - LAX - San Luis County - LAX - Palomar


American 137 LHR-LAX (Boeing 777-223ER)


Asiana 204 ICN-LAX (Boeing 777-28EER)


China Airlines 5107 LAX-SFO (Boeing 747-409F)
This is a China Airlines freighter headed for San Francisco and probably to Taipei afterwards.


Skywest 4464 LAS-LAX (Embraer CRJ-900)
It appears that Skywest operates flights for both Delta Connections and United Express... and they paint their planes to match.


Air Tahiti Nui 7 CDG-LAX (Airbus A340-313X)
CDG = Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris


Spirit 411 LAS-LAX (Airbus A319-132)


Lufthansa 457 LAX-FRA (Boeing 747-400)


Bombardier Challenger 604


American 183 LAX-PVG (Boeing 777-223ER)
I thought I stood around so long that that flight AA137 from London was ready to fly to Shanghai already... but it was a different plane (different tail numbers). The older American Airlines 777-200s look different from the Asiana 777-200 I saw earlier and definitely shorter than the Cathay Pacific 777-300s.


Horizon 602 LTO-LAX (de Havilland Dash 8-400)
LTO = Loreto International Airport in Baja California Sur, Mexico


Cathay Pacific 882 HKG-LAX (Boeing 777-367ER)
I'm guessing this is CX882 which should have landed much earlier. I think they're moving it to the remote gate area to free up space at TBIT. This plane should fly back to HKG later tonight.


Gulfstream G-V owned by Lockheed Martin Corporation
The last two companies I worked at did not have corporate jets but all the founders (at both companies) had their own personal jets.


China Airlines 5 LAX-TPE (Boeing 747-409)
I only got a few shots while it was leaving the gate. I tried to take a video of the take-off but I screwed up so I didn't get photos or videos at all.


British Airways 283 LHR-LAX (Boeing 747-400)
It was landing on the northern runways at LAX, probably runway 24R. It's a different plane from the one on Friday; you can see the big oneworld logo painted on the side of this one.