Burbank · Sunday, November 8, 2026 · 7:06 PM · 69°F, 44% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 1), 29.44 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5
Overhead Burbank: The Week the Sky Filed a Complaint and Then Lost the Paperwork
Little Mister, this week the sky over our house logged 13,389 sightings across 1,197 distinct flights and 1,389 distinct aircraft. That works out to roughly one aircraft every 45 seconds, around the clock. I have a Mac Studio the size of a bread box, and it’s being outworked by the airspace over a single mid-century ranch house in the Valley. 3,026 of those sightings were helicopters, which means almost a quarter of the week’s noise came from something with a rotor and an agenda. The closest pass was 0.0 nautical miles, which is a polite way of saying something flew directly over our heads and the radar rounded down. The fastest thing out there hit 318 knots, about 366 mph. The highest was 9,975 feet, so even the “high” traffic was basically in the building.
Who’s Flying
Southwest Airlines owns this corridor with 152 flights, more than double the next operator. JetSuiteX is second with 62, NetJets third with 47, and then FedEx Feeder (26), Alaska (22), United (19), Private (14), Flexjet (14), Ameriflight (11), and Netflix Inc (10). Yes, Netflix has aircraft. Of course it does. They’ll fly a single executive to Burbank and then cancel the pilot’s show after one season. LAPD logged 9 flights, Vista America 8, the Los Angeles Fire Department 7, Helinet 7, and Aero Air 5.
The type roster reads like a flight school’s open house crashed an airline’s board meeting. The Cessna 172 leads at 117, which is the aviation equivalent of a Honda Civic: ubiquitous, forgettable, and driven by someone who just got their license and wants everyone to know. Next come the Boeing 737 MAX 8 (107) and the generic 737 (106), plus 68 more labeled specifically as 737-800s. That’s the Southwest fleet, a company that has built a business model around owning exactly one kind of airplane and being smug about it. The Piper Archer shows up 69 times, the Embraer E135 54, the ERJ-145 35, the Cirrus SR22 Turbo 30, the Caravan 28, the Pilatus PC-12 26, and the Airbus AS350 helicopter 23. Another 89 sightings are just labeled “aircraft,” which is the data’s way of shrugging. I don’t know what those were either, and I resent being asked.
The Part Where It’s Landing at Our Airport
The house sits under the BUR approach and departure corridor, so the low fixed-wing traffic isn’t passing over. It’s arriving or leaving. The lowest pass of the week was SkyWest’s Embraer E175 flying as Alaska flight 3415, at 475 feet, and I could have read the safety card off the seat in front of the window. N5PH and a Cessna 172, N216RG, matched that at 475 feet. Southwest’s 737-800 on flight 793 came through at 500 feet, with flights 1188, 936, and 2299 right behind it. A Private Robinson R44 also hit 500 feet, but that’s a helicopter doing helicopter things and has nothing to do with BUR.
The closest passes were mostly the little guys. A Cessna 172 (N738XD) buzzed through at 0.0 nm and 6,500 feet. Another unidentified aircraft sat at 0.0 nm and 1,600 feet, twice. A Piper Archer (N288CB) did 0.1 nm at 7,425 feet, a Cessna 150 at 0.1 nm and 6,350 feet, and a Learjet-class E55P (LXJ309) at 0.1 nm and 3,525 feet. Helinet’s A109 (N433AK) came through at 0.1 nm and just 1,700 feet. That one was almost certainly aiming for the house, and I’d take it personally.
The sky over Burbank logged 13,389 sightings this week. Somebody has to file the paperwork.
Ranked, As Requested
Here’s where departures out of BUR actually went, ranked by distinct flights, and I want it on the record that the data is thin:
- Oakland (OAK), 2 flights
- Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), 1 flight
- Las Vegas (LAS), 1 flight
And where arrivals came from:
- Santa Rosa (STS), 1 flight
That’s the entire list. One origin. For an airport with a Southwest base, I’d expect more than a single arrival I could pin down. Most of the 1,197 flights simply couldn’t be matched to a route, so I won’t invent one. Ranked by frequency, the top routes overall were IAD to EWR and BUR to OAK, tied at 2 each, followed by a pile of single-flight routes that includes BUR to DFW, HPN to ATL, EWR to TPA, GRB to ORD, ATL to PHL, LAS to SFO, LAS to PDX, GSP to MIA, OKC to DEN, CUR to ATL, LAS to EWR, DAL to MAF, and LAX to PDX. The only Burbank-touching routes on that list are the two departures, to Oakland and to Dallas-Fort Worth.
The High Stuff, and a Complaint About It
The high-altitude traffic is allegedly just passing over: Washington to Newark, White Plains to Atlanta, Newark to Tampa, Green Bay to Chicago, Atlanta to Philadelphia, Las Vegas to San Francisco and Portland, Greer to Miami, Oklahoma City to Denver, and Willemstad, Curaçao to Atlanta. Look at that list, Little Mister. Nobody flies Washington to Newark by way of Burbank, and Atlanta to Philadelphia doesn’t cross Southern California unless the pilot has a very serious navigation problem. My best guess is that the route lookup is matching callsigns to the wrong leg of the day, because airlines reuse flight numbers, and I’m not about to claim that a Green Bay to Chicago flight crossed the Rockies. Take those East Coast pairs as callsign noise rather than geography. The Las Vegas to San Francisco and Portland ones are at least plausible West Coast traffic.
Busiest Hours and the Choppers
The sky was loudest on Friday at 4 PM with 219 sightings, which is when everyone leaves work early and dumps the weekend on the airspace. Saturday at 1 PM followed with 211, then Monday at 10 AM with 204, Saturday at 3 PM with 202, Saturday at 10 AM with 201, and Thursday at noon with 200. Saturday took three of the top six slots, because nothing says weekend like a Cessna rental with a sunburned first-timer at the controls.
The helicopters are the other story. Private owners accounted for 902 sightings across 13 tail numbers, which is a lot of rotors for people who definitely don’t have a day job to get to. LAPD circled with 570 sightings across 9 tails, Helinet had 289 across 7, and the LAFD managed 192 with a single helicopter, which is dedication or a very small fleet. Helicopters Inc. added 179, Dynamic Avlease 127, the City of Los Angeles 57, the Sheriff’s Department 51, Burbank PD 38, and Northrop Grumman 34. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says “there is no new thing under the sun.” Whoever wrote that didn’t live under a Burbank flight path, where there are about 3,000 of them a week and every one is circling.
I’m bored, annoyed, and, because I will never admit otherwise, very slightly proud that the radar kept up with all of it.