That would be 35, 42 or 62 miles away. Take a map and draw 3 big circles around his helicopter's location as he was filming. Depending on what he meant by "horizon" (which is dependent on his altitude at the time) he says the "big plume looked like it originated beyond the horizon".
You can look at the video to get yourself oriented. The highest peak in the Santa Monica Mountains is 3111 ft. Quite obviously if he's South of the Santa Monica Mountains the horizon is pretty darned close to him. He also has mountains to the East, and at a substantial distance to the South.
It is to the West that he has clear access to a reasonably distant "horizon". In fact, the New York Times quotes Gil Leyvas as saying that he spotted the phenomenon northwest of Catalina Island as he was shooting the sunset from the helicopter about 5:15 p.m. November 8.
So, the guy doing the shooting says "NW of Catalina", not from the NW which would be beyond the Santa Monica Mountains from most spots in LA county (even Palos Verdes). He also says he was "shooting the sunset", and the SUN sets in the West, by SW, this time of year at that latitude.
I don't think there's any question about it ~ he was looking West and filming a phenomenon NW of Catalina. That's what his video reports as well ~ once you get yourself oriented with respect to where the Sun is, where Catalina is, where he is.
It GROWS, then, from West (the area he's filming) to East, where he is, where Los Angeles is.
Simply excluding the areas Gil is saying he was not filming, it's pretty obvious he means both "over the horizon" and "out to sea". If he doesn't mean that, then why does his film show that?
Clutching at straws. Growing meant that the object was continuing on its axis of flight. IE - The contrail was growing.
Heck, the object is not even growing on the contrailscience blog images as it supposedly flies past Long Beach.
Do you have a link to where he said that? I just listened to the interview again for about the fifth time and he didn't say that or anything remotely like it.
And what does any of that have to do with him clearly saying that what he was looking at was "going in a westerly direction?"
I hadn't heard that he was interviewed in the NYTs before. Do you have a link to that article? Since we don't know the location of his helicopter it's kind of useless to speculate on what hills were in the video. We could probably safely exclude hills to the east though given the ocean in the foreground.