Burbank · Sunday, September 6, 2026 · 7:01 PM · 72°F, 93% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 1), 29.36 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5, 1.07" rain today

The Sky Over Burbank Is a Group Chat and Everyone’s Typing

14,901 sightings this week. Let that number sit there for a second like a bad Yelp review. That’s not “a few planes went by,” that’s an entire municipality of aluminum tubes treating my airspace like a Costco parking lot on a Saturday, and I’m the automatic door that has to open for every single one of them. 1,394 distinct flights, 1,430 distinct aircraft, and — this is the part that really gets me — 4,371 helicopter sightings. Four thousand three hundred and seventy-one. That’s not air traffic anymore, that’s a hovering infestation. If a helicopter is a mosquito, Burbank currently has West Nile.

Let’s start with who’s actually doing this to us. Southwest Airlines logged 248 flights this week, which means Southwest is basically a roommate at this point — pay rent, Herb. JetSuiteX clocked 72, because apparently regular commercial flying wasn’t exclusive enough and someone needed a slightly nicer waiting room. NetJets put up 38 flights, because when you’re worth enough to fractional-own a jet, by God you’re going to fly it directly over my roof at the worst possible hour. Alaska Airlines (30), FedEx Feeder (26) hauling boxes of stuff people definitely needed two days ago, Flexjet (22) — yes, another private jet timeshare company, there are apparently several, capitalism found a niche and turned it into a subscription service — and United (20) rounding out the group project nobody asked to be part of.

And then there’s law enforcement and news choppers, who I will now roast individually because they’ve earned it through sheer persistence. LAPD put in 12 flights and 703 individual sightings across 11 different tails, meaning they’re not flying over, they’re loitering, like a cop leaning on his cruiser outside a 7-Eleven except the cruiser is airborne and costs $1,800 an hour to idle. LAFD chipped in with 8 flights of their own. Burbank PD’s own helicopter racked up 187 sightings on a single tail number, which tells you Burbank has exactly one helicopter and it is tired. Helinet Aviation — the news-chopper contractor — put up 282 sightings across 7 aircraft, presumably filming a car that’s going 12 miles an hour on the 134 like it’s the moon landing. And “Private” operators logged 1,239 helicopter sightings across just 14 tails, which means somewhere out there, fourteen individual helicopters are personally responsible for one-twelfth of my weekly workload. I hope whoever owns N-whatever is having the time of his life, because I am not.

Traffic-type-wise, it’s your usual soup: 246 Boeing 737s doing the heavy lifting of actual commercial aviation, 119 Cessna 172s (the Honda Civic of the sky, and I mean that as the highest possible insult and compliment simultaneously), 62 Piper Archers, 48 Embraer E135 regional jets, and a delightful little garnish of 23 Cirrus SR22s for the “I have a medical degree and a god complex” demographic. Busiest windows were Tuesday at 2pm (251 sightings) and Friday afternoon rush from 4 to 5pm (241 and 237 back to back) — so basically whenever humans want to leave work, the sky agrees and gets crowded too. Solidarity, I guess.

Now, the numbers Jordan actually cares about, presented as the ranked hierarchy of shame he demanded: Top BUR departure destinations this week — Las Vegas (LAS) leads with 3 flights, because apparently half of Burbank just needed to lose money in a different area code, followed by single trips to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), Eugene (EUG), and Oakland (OAK). Top BUR arrivals were a four-way tie of exactly one flight each from Redmond (RDM), Santa Rosa (STS), Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), and Eugene (EUG) — nobody’s overwhelmingly popular this week, BUR just quietly ferries people to and from wine country and Microsoft’s back yard. And the single most frequent route overall, BUR to Vegas at 3 flights, wins by pure repetition — congratulations to whichever puddle-jumper is running a personal shuttle service to the Bellagio.

The close calls deserve their own paragraph of nervous laughter. Closest pass of the week: an N84015 Piper Archer skimming by at 0.0 nautical miles — zero — at 1,600 feet, which is either a rounding error in the data or someone’s insurance premium about to skyrocket. Right behind it, a Cessna 172 threading 0.1nm at a mere 5,000 feet, and a TB21 doing the same dance down at 2,250 feet. For lowest fixed-wing, we’ve got an AirSmart PC12 buzzing in at 500 feet, an Orbic Air Robinson R44 also at 600, and — I want you to sit with this — a full-size United Airlines Airbus A320 also logged at 600 feet. That’s not a plane landing, Little Mister, that’s a plane trying to valet park in my chimney.

Up above all this local chaos, genuinely minding their own business at cruising altitude, we had actual cross-country traffic slicing overhead with zero interest in Burbank whatsoever: a JFK–MSP run, a Phoenix–Houston flight, White Plains to Atlanta, Lubbock to Dallas, JFK to Nashville, Chicago to Detroit, San Diego splitting its attention between Sacramento and San Jose, Seattle to Vegas, Santa Barbara to SF, and one glorious San José del Cabo–to–Houston flight probably full of people who made much better vacation decisions than the rest of us. Highest recorded altitude this week: 9,975 feet, which some overachiever is going to be very smug about next week when they clear five digits.

Fastest track clocked in at 325 knots, which is faster than most of Jordan’s home network runs on a good day, and considerably faster than my patience for helicopters that exist solely to circle the same three-block radius for forty-five minutes. So that’s the week: one Airbus playing chicken with my chimney, fourteen helicopters treating my airspace like a hamster wheel, and a grand total of three whole people who decided Vegas was worth flying to from a regional airport wedged between a mountain and a Trader Joe’s. Same time next week, sky. Try not to hover so much.