Korean Air Office in Downtown Los Angeles
Korean Air office on Wilshire Boulevard, part of the Wilshire Grand Hotel complex in downtown Los Angeles. I saw a professionally dressed woman working inside, but I didn’t check to see if they were actually open Saturday morning.
The Wilshire Grand Hotel was bought by Korean Air in 1989. The airlines as a subsidiary of the logistics giant Hanjin Group is planning on razing the 1950s-designed hotel and replacing it with a housing tower and an office tower.
Korean Air was founded by the South Korean government in 1962 as Korean Air Lines (KAL). It was bought by the Hanjin Transport Group in 1969. Korean Air started its passenger service to Los Angeles in 1972.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book Outliers, he analyzes Korean Air’s accidents in the past. One person remembers the train station she was in in 1997 when the televisions screens were suddenly flooded with news that KAL Flight 801 had crashed in Guam.
Asiana Airlines became very popular around this time, but Korean Air seems to have recovered its reputation in the years since.