Have you ever flown in to San Diego International Airport? Did you remember descending into the city, feeling like you would almost hit a freeway or a parking garage? Our airport is within walking distance of downtown, on a bit of “land” that was reclaimed from San Diego Bay. Because the terrain drops over 200 feet in the last mile or so of the approach, there is no glide slope on Runway 27 (and the prevailing winds are off the ocean, so Runway 9 isn’t usually a good option), so pilots need a decent amount of visibility for the localizer or the RNAV approach. Also, the ocean generates the so-called “marine layer,” which blankets the aiport in fog on a not-irregular basis. And guess what else? Due to the location of the Marine Corps recruiting depot, we only have room for one runway, 9-27. And the last time that the runway was repaved was a large number of years ago, so they are repaving it now. Every night from midnight to 5am the airport is totally, 100%, completely closed, and no planes can land or take off.

You might think that an airport in a small-ish city with a 9400 ft runway (with a displaced threshold of 1000 ft on 9 and of 1810 ft on 27) with significant drawbacks and that is not unreasonably far from LAX might not get a lot get a lot of interesting planes, but we do! These days we get a daily 747 from British Airways. But the plane that I’ve sort of been stalking has been the A330 from Hawaiian Airlines. We get it every day! But it typically lands after 10pm, when there is no decent light to take a photograph.

Last night my FlightAware alerts told me that HAL 16 was going to be delayed.

Hawaiian Airlines #16 flight information has changed
Departure Time is now Tue 19-Dec-2017 05:00PM HST
Arrival Time is now Wed 20-Dec-2017 12:12AM PST

And I am thinking, no way is that going to happen. That plane is going to be diverted. Would it be diverted to Ontario (a popular diversion location)? Would it have so little fuel that it would be diverted to Miramar (unlikely, since they must have known that it was going to be diverted before it took off)?

It was diverted to LAX. And then N399HA will fly to Kailua/Kona, HI later this morning. I’m assuming that the passengers from HAL 16 are being bused to San Diego.

But what about the people scheduled on today’s HAL 15 from San Diego to Honolulu?

Hawaiian has scheduled a repositioning flight! N383HA will be flying here from Seattle as HAL 8024! It will be landing around 1pm! It is a beautiful day out, clear and sunny – really good for photographing planes landing!

But my camera is at home, so I can’t just dash to the airport over lunch. And I’m working on something using computational resources that can only be access from within the office, so I can’t just go to the airport and work from home the rest of the afternoon. And it seems sort of silly to take the rest of the day off to go take a picture of an airplane. Especially, as I did get one shot of the A330 back when San Diego had an NFL team and one of their opponents chartered an A330.