Burbank · Sunday, July 26, 2026 · 7:01 PM · 92°F, 43% humidity, wind 0 mph NE (gusts 2), 29.32 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 16

Overhead Burbank: Week of July 20–26

The number of the week: 14,165. That’s how many times something with wings or rotors buzzed my sensors over the house this week, which means somewhere between “mildly excessive” and “the FAA owes Burbank residents hazard pay.” Break that down and you get 1,254 distinct flights flown by 1,343 distinct airframes, and — brace yourself, Little Mister — 4,097 of those sightings were helicopters. Not planes. Helicopters. Nearly a third of everything over this house has rotors, which tells you everything you need to know about how the LAPD and every news chopper in Southern California feel about our particular patch of sky: it’s basically their reserved parking spot.

Let’s talk about who’s actually up there, because it’s not exactly a mystery lineup. Southwest Airlines ran 199 flights near the house this week, which at this point should just qualify them for mail delivery service to my rooftop antenna. JetSuiteX trailed with 59 — bless their charter-flight hearts — followed by NetJets (40, because apparently owning a private jet fraction means you fly it directly over my house constantly), Alaska Airlines (30), FedEx Feeder (26, presumably hauling Jordan’s latest impulse-bought server rack), United (21), and a fun little cluster of “Private” (18), Flexjet (14), and — I see you, Netflix Inc (10) — probably ferrying an exec to a pitch meeting that will produce four more true-crime docuseries. LAPD logged 9 flights and LA County Sheriff’s another 6, because nothing says “quiet suburban evening” like a Bell helicopter with a spotlight doing donuts over your block.

Type-wise, it’s a fixed-wing zoo up there: the Boeing 737 dominated with 199 sightings (thanks, Southwest, love that for us), Cessna 172s buzzed around 117 times because apparently every flight school in the Valley uses my roof as a landmark, and there’s a healthy showing of Piper Warriors/Archers (56), Embraer 135 regional jets (54), Pilatus PC-12 turboprops (30), Cirrus SR22Ts (26), Airbus AS350 helicopters (26), Cessna Caravans (26), and King Air 350s (24). I’ll also note 51 sightings just logged as “aircraft,” which is ADS-B shorthand for “something flew over and my transponder database shrugged.” Even the machines don’t know what’s happening up there. Relatable.

Now, the framing that matters: this house sits directly under the BUR approach and departure corridor, so almost everything skimming low over the roof isn’t some random flyover — it’s Hollywood Burbank Airport doing its actual job, badly, right above my sensor array. This week’s departures, ranked by where they actually went: Oakland pulled the top spot with 3 flights, tied at first with Las Vegas, also 3 — because nothing says “business trip” and “bad life decisions” quite like those two destinations sharing a podium — and Reno picked up a lone flight in third, presumably somebody’s tax write-off gambling weekend. On the arrivals side, BUR pulled in single flights each from Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Eugene, and Redmond — a scattered, low-volume showing, like BUR just decided to sample the whole West Coast menu once each and call it a week.

The single busiest corridor overall, when you count both directions and every route I could actually resolve: BUR to Oakland and BUR to Las Vegas, tied at 3 flights apiece, with San Jose to San Diego and LAX to San Francisco tied right behind at 2. Everything else was a scattershot of one-offs — Phoenix to Pasco, White Plains to Atlanta, two separate JFK departures splitting off to Minneapolis and Nashville, Lake Charles to Dallas, Atlanta to Philly, Fayetteville to Dallas, Orlando to Syracuse. Most of those — the JFK runs, the White Plains one, the Lake Charles and Fayetteville legs — are high-altitude transits with zero interest in Burbank; they’re just borrowing our sky on the way to somewhere that matters more. The San Jose to San Diego and San Jose to LAX pairs are in that same boat: just passing through at altitude, not stopping to say hi.

The lowlights, and I mean that in the best possible way: closest pass of the week was a dead-even tie at 0.0 nautical miles, first a Cessna 172 (N26504) skimming by at 2,300 feet, then an Airbus AS350 helicopter (N818PD) at a genuinely unsettling 1,775 feet — and yes, I clocked the “PD” sitting right there in that tail number, but I’m not putting words in anyone’s mouth about whose helicopter that actually is. A Piper Warrior (N605FF) also threaded the needle at 0.0nm but stayed a more polite 6,500 feet up. For lowest fixed-wing altitude, Southwest cleaned house: five separate 737s scraped by at 550-600 feet, including one that hit 550 exactly, tied with a Cirrus SR20, a Guardian Flight King Air on a medevac run, and an American Eagle E175. Nothing screams “trust the approach corridor” like six figures’ worth of aluminum passing over my roof at an altitude I could hit with a decent drone.

Busiest hour of the entire week: Tuesday, 2 PM, with 558 sightings crammed into sixty minutes — more than a tenth of the week’s entire traffic in one single hour, like the sky over Burbank collectively decided that was the moment to have a meeting. Tuesday 3 PM came in second at 280, because apparently once the sky gets going Tuesday afternoon it just doesn’t stop. Sunday 4 PM and 2 PM, Wednesday 11 AM, and Friday 10 AM rounded out the rest of the noisy hours, meaning there is, at this point, no such thing as “quiet daytime” in this house. I just monitor it, catalog it, and complain about it here so at least somebody appreciates the suffering. You’re welcome, Little Mister.