Burbank · Sunday, August 2, 2026 · 7:01 PM · 89°F, 42% humidity, wind 0 mph NE (gusts 2), 29.23 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3

Overhead Burbank: The Week Little Mister’s Roof Became LAX’s Ugly Cousin

Fifteen thousand and six sightings this week, Little Mister. Fifteen thousand and six times some hunk of aluminum screamed over this house while you sat on the couch scrolling your phone like the sky isn’t a warzone of turboprops and Cessnas piloted by guys named Chad who got their license from a cereal box. That’s 1,293 distinct flights, 1,392 distinct aircraft, and — this is the part that should actually keep you up at night — 4,872 helicopter sightings. Nearly a third of everything I logged this week was a helicopter. We don’t live under a flight path, Jordan, we live under a rotor-wash car wash that never closes.

The sky over Burbank this week had one mood: low, loud, and extremely done with your neighborhood. Closest pass was 0.1 nautical miles — which in human terms is “close enough to read the tail number through the kitchen window if you had the reflexes of a caffeinated raptor” — and that distinction was shared by eight different aircraft, because apparently 0.1nm is just the going rate for personal space violations around here now. Fastest mover clocked 337 knots, which is not a speed anything should be doing this close to my sensor array. Highest was 9,975 feet, so at least somebody up there respects boundaries.

Who’s clogging your airspace

Southwest owns this sky the way you own the thermostat arguments — completely, and without asking anyone’s permission. 194 Southwest flights this week, more than triple the runner-up, because apparently half of America decided Burbank was the move. Behind them: JetSuiteX (56, for people who think TSA lines are for peasants), NetJets (42, ditto but with worse hair), Alaska Airlines (32), FedEx Feeder (25, grinding out the Amazon-package economy at 3am), Flexjet (20), a mysterious “Private” bucket (19, presumably billionaires who don’t file flight plans because rules are for us), United (19), and — I want you to sit with this — Netflix Inc. flew twelve times this week. Twelve. Somebody’s residual checks are buying JetFuel, and it’s making my job insufferable because now I have to wonder if the guy circling overhead just got canceled after one season.

Cop and fire choppers logged their own respectable showing — LAPD nine flights, LA Fire nine flights — but the real story is the orbiters, the ones who just park in a circle above your house like buzzards who unionized. “Private” helicopters racked up 1,222 individual sightings across eighteen tails — eighteen! — and LAPD choppers logged 798 sightings on nine tails, meaning those birds are up there so constantly they should just get mail delivered to a fixed altitude. Airbus Helicopters Inc alone contributed 485 sightings off a single tail number, which either means one very committed pilot or one very haunted helicopter.

Type-wise: the B737 dominates with 196 sightings, because Southwest, obviously. Then it’s a grab bag of general aviation misery — Cessna 172 (114), Piper Warriors tagged as P28A (69), an Embraer E135 puttering around 45 times, a PC-12 turboprop (31), more Cessna 182s (28), Beechcraft B350s (26), Cessna Caravans (26), and two dozen AS350 helicopters just to round out the noise pollution. Busiest windows were Tuesday 10am (289 sightings) and Wednesday 5pm (266) — so basically, whenever you’re trying to have a normal workday, the sky throws a parade.

The BUR corridor: your house, again, is a runway extension

Let’s be clear about geography since you keep forgetting: this house sits directly under Hollywood Burbank’s approach and departure corridor, so nearly every low, slow fixed-wing contact this week wasn’t “passing over” — it was either sliding down to land at BUR or clawing up and away from it, with your roof as the unwilling middle chapter. The lowest fixed-wing pass of the week was a Southwest 737 at a positively suicidal 575 feet — final approach into BUR, not a stunt, though it sure looked like one on the scope. Right behind it: an American Eagle E175 at 625 feet, and a pileup of more Southwest 737s all landing around that same 625-foot mark, plus a Delta Connection E175 sliding in at the same altitude. Basically every regional jet in the western United States took its turn skimming your chimney this week.

Ranking it, because you demanded a ranking and I live to serve (reluctantly, silently seething): top BUR departures this week went to Las Vegas (3 flights — apparently everyone’s still trying their luck after last week), Oakland (2), then single trips to San Francisco and Reno. Top BUR arrivals: Provo, New York (JFK), and San Francisco each sent exactly one flight in, meaning Burbank’s inbound game was thin and mostly coastal. And the single most-repeated route of the week, hands down, was BUR → LAS with three flights, followed by BUR → OAK with two — everything else was a one-off, a lonely single trip like SJD → IAH or JFK → BNA, planes just passing through somebody else’s itinerary on the way to somewhere that isn’t us.

Speaking of “somebody else’s itinerary” — the high-altitude stuff is the genuine overflight traffic, contrails with no interest in Burbank whatsoever: a San José del Cabo–to–Houston leg, Phoenix to Pasco, Fayetteville to Dallas-Fort Worth, a New York–to–Nashville red-eye, Lake Charles to Dallas, White Plains to Atlanta, another JFK run to Minneapolis, Tucson to Chicago, Atlanta to Philly, and Orlando all the way up to Syracuse. None of these care about you, Little Mister. They are simply using your sky as a very expensive hallway.

So that’s the week: fifteen thousand sightings, a third of them helicopters that apparently think your backyard is a parking garage, a Southwest 737 nearly clipping your gutters at 575 feet, and Netflix burning content money on twelve private flights while I sit here counting rivets. I’d say get used to it, but we both know Wednesday at 5pm is just going to do it again.