Rather unfortunate story. In 1992 during the LA (Rodney King) Riots they had to run all inbound and outbound traffic over the ocean, day and night.

There had been reports of people shooting at planes coming in over South Central LA (normal landings on Runway 24 and 25).

Sadly, I'm surprised that it doesn't happen more often..

AA has a late flt ORD-LAX -- it has been scheduled out of ORD as late as 10:55pm in recent months, with an arrival of 1:09am. Once, we were about 30 mins. late out of ORD, and made the W-E approach & landing (onto 6L/R, as WHBM noted).

Other times, that flight has landed "regularly" - but I cant remember it ever having been that late, so maybe the hour was a factor in addition to winds.

LAX takeoff/landing pattern
 

From various places/peoples etc., I have heard the landing is from East during the day using 24R or 25L and takeoff is to the west usig 24L and 25R unless there is Santa Ana winds. During the Santa Ana winds, this is reversed.
Normal operation during the night between 12 am and 6 am is land mainly on 6L and takeoff on 25L.
As others have mentioned, the daytime operation during the past week was similar to the Santa Ana condition. It was that way during the rainstorm during the evening of 2/10 and it was that way when I took off this morning at 7 am. The windsock showed the wind was blowing from the East so that shows why we took off East. The rain storm was probably causing the change in the wind direction.

HJ

what's fun is watching planes take off from SAN in the opposite direction. Looks like they're going to slam into the parking garage so conviently placed right in front of the runway.

I have been on a few flights which departed LAX in the reverse direction. It totally freaked me out taking off over the city. Just seemed wrong (although, I knew it was right).

SAN must use RWY9, W-E approach, when low clouds exist and wind permits due to the runway equipped with an ILS approacch. Landing from the west allows the pilots a lower ceiling.

As mentioned landings from the west are required in calm winds at LAX after +/- midnight. Landings don't always occur on 6L/R (north side) either, LAX will permit RWY 7L/R (south side) in most cases when operations are light.

This happened to me last Thursday. It freaked me out, as well.

I work close to LAX, and today I also noticed some planes that looked like they had taken off in the reverse direction.

Well not quite :)

I landed at LAX at 1545 PST and came in heading east. The pilot did make point about winds from out of the East, but low clouds might have been a factor we seem to have been travelling a fair time over the ocean before the final approach.

mike

edited to add today 2/22

Wouldnt surprise me that some of the reason was also that the police helicopters were heavily patrolling Inglewood and didn't want to collide with landing planes.

FWIW, I went to weather.com and checked out the projections for LA for the next few days. It looks like much of the time winds are coming from the E/ESE/SE, at speeds under 10 knots. When the storm clears, though, winds are shifting back to the S/SW.

Like everyone out here, I just want to see the sun again...if I'm not going to have good weather, why did I leave NYC?!?

Procedure at LAX when landing Easterly is (simplistically) that landings on the north side runways are taken out over the ocean and turned onto final approach at 4,000 feet, from where they run in. Those on the south side are taken down to 2,000 feet and turned onto their parallel approach, then they fly level until they intercept their descent path. This is a standard practice so aircraft making the turns (which may well be in cloud of course and done on instruments), if they overshoot the approach path, are not a threat to aircraft headed for the opposite runways as they are at different heights. Hence thr resulting long run in.

On the rare occasions when there are simultaneous parallel approaches to the two runways at London Heathrow you see the same thing.

i landed to the south at sfo today (not as exciting as i'd hoped).

I've been on a flight that was approaching LAX from the east (normal), but told pretty close to landing (3,000 ft. high, I would guess), to go around and land from the west. The pilot made an announcement about how the airport was switching the takeoff/landing direction.

Smart pilot -- I'm sure several on the flight would have gotten nervous had they seen only the dark Pacific below when they expected to see LAX.

So that's why flights were coming over the East Bay hills unusually low today.