monitoring LAX

I discovered this incredibly useful and mesmerizing website, Airport Monitor. Need to find out the ETA for your girlfriend's flight into LAX? How about no-kidding flight location for VIP flight tracking or emergency response? Airport Monitor provides complete, independent, accurate and timely information for airlines, airports and corporate aviation.

The website shows the departing and arriving planes, planes in transit, helicopters, and highlights your flight so you can see where it lines up on the arrivals queue. Clicking on any of the planes will give you the details for that flight and you can either watch in current mode, or rewind to a specific date/time and watch at a variety of accelerated speeds. Careful, this site is spellbinding. I logged on to find some flight information and once accomplished, I stayed, dreamily watching planes arrive and depart LAX in real-time.

I zoomed out to 20 miles and watched the red, green, black and blue planes flit across the map of the greater Los Angeles area. Though not as poetic as watching planes arrive or depart up close, it still gives me a little bit of that wistful feeling from witnessing people at the start or end of a journey.