Last month I wrote about problems with the People Mover at LAX in Los Angeles. This project, now called Skylink, is basically just one of those small automated trains that moves people around big airports. Lots of airports already have them but LAX still does not.
This project has been underway for a decade and now officially more than three years past its original delivery date. Last month the opening date was delayed to early January 2027 and then days later was delayed again until February. The exact cause of the delay isn’t clear, but it might have had something to do with this:
Wow… LAX People Mover flashover was caught on video https://t.co/RwYuvnFJDQ
— Oren Ben-Joseph (@orenbj) October 27, 2026
That massive fireball is part of an electrical flashover that happens when the high voltage used to power these trains shorts out on the tracks. Obviously, this is not supposed to be happening on a brand new train system. A light-rail expert who looked at the video above at the request of a local news station said it was the worst one he’d ever seen.
We showed the video to light-rail and people-mover expert Timothy Borchers.
“This is one of the most severe flashovers I’ve ever witnessed,” Borchers told us.
And of course it probably goes without saying that this project is also massively over budget. In fact at a total cost of $3.3 billion, this cost well over $1 billion per mile. The whole loop is only 2.25 miles long.
All of this has led to the original bonds used to fund the project being downgraded to junk status. The bonds were already in the upper-tier of junk bond status before the latest delay and now they’ve slipped down to the very bottom of junk bond status.
Credit agency Fitch Ratings has dealt another blow to the troubled Skylink people mover train at Los Angeles International Airport, downgrading the project’s debt deeper into junk bond territory over the continued inability of the contractor and city’s airport department to complete the project.
The downgrade — to B-, from BB four months ago — “reflects the near certainty” that contractor LINXS won’t have the 2.25-mile train running by Dec. 8, leading to a “technical event of default and could give rights to either LINXS or Los Angeles World Airports … to issue project termination notices,” Fitch said in a report this week…
The deadline for the train’s completion is Dec. 8. Although the airport or the contractor could technically terminate the contract at that time, Lehman noted that there’s a 120-day buffering period to allow for additional time to settle issues.
“After you get past that date, then the question becomes: Will both sides still want to work with each other, or just decide to find a path toward separation?” Lehman said about the months-long grace period.
So they definitely are not going to make the deadline and are already saying the opening date will be two months into the 4-month buffer period at the end of the contract. Given how many times this has been delayed before, the possibility that it gets pushed again to March or April seems very possible. At some point, you have to wonder what happens when they are just working outside the contract. That’s not how big projects like this work. And they are already not working well together.
LINXS filed a complaint against the city over the summer blaming the airport for the delays. Last month, the airport disputed multiple claims that the contractor made in its monthly brief on the project. And meetings between chief executives for the contractor, airport officials and others that began last year stopped in August.
As much of a disaster as this project already is, both years later and far over budget, it could still get worse. After all, this is blue California and we can’t build anything here anymore.
This local news report is from September. At that time the project had just been delayed from October to January. The newscaster wonders whether there will every be any accountability for the delays and overspending. But in this state the answer is almost certainly no. Why? Because once the blame starts going around there are only people on team blue to hold responsible. No one here wants that.
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