Hello. I'm Tony and I'm a plane spotter.
There, I've taken the first step and admitted my problem. If you have visions of a guy introducing himself to members of a support group, you've got the picture. I don't know what pathology leads people to go to varying lengths to catch sight of aircraft, log their registrations and/or take photos of them, but it exists.
As a youngster living near Gatwick Airport, with a father working for British Airways, it should come as no surprise that I caught the aviation bug and became a spotter. It seemed to be more interesting than hanging around the streets doing not very much. It actually helped me academically as my love of aircraft and research into where flights had originated saw me top of the class in Geography and curiosity about those places developed my general knowledge and love of current affairs and travel. So perhaps it's not all bad.
I grew up in Crawley, West Sussex (someone had to). Weekends and school holidays in the 1980s (when not away on a beach somewhere) saw me riding my bike up the A23 to Lowfield Heath to peer through the fence parallel to Gatwick's runway. From there I would peddle on round to the South Terminal to visit the spectators area (you could padlock your bike to the railings under the terminal in those days). Then with the "light" stuff not quite visible from the 4th floor equivalent of a kettling exercise, the last leg of the journey would take me on round to the General Aviation terminal to cop any new visitors there.
There were also numerous days out to Heathrow, catching the 727 bus for a visit to the Queen's Building to add what seemed altogether more exotic fayre to the red underlines in my Civil Aircraft Markings and World Airline Fleets books. Time and again I told myself I would one day do the journey on the Gatwick-Heathrow Airlink (G-LINK) but the service was scrapped before I got around to it.
Those were the days. Life was simple and fun and until I had to grow up and join the adult world, aviation was everything.
Fast forward to January 2012. A chance visit to Biggin Hill a couple of weeks ago, saw me casually watch some of the biz jets coming and going. Inevitably I got chatting to a car load of spotters who had pitched up from Bournemouth. It was then I discovered just how much times have moved on in the world of the plane spotter!
Here were four guys equipped with some lovely, powerful binoculars and scopes that enabled them to see the regs on biz jets all the way down at the Biggin passenger terminal. They had digital airband radios that were a far cry from my old pocket money draining crystal airband version of yesteryear. But the biggest eye opener for me was seeing them effortlessly copping overflights by checking their iPhones and using the "Plane Finder" app to log the regs of stuff in the stack for Heathrow and heavies at higher altitudes leaving contrails as they passed over London.
With so many technological advances since my adolescent spotting days, new airline fleets and new light stuff to cop, being a fully mobile grown up earning rather more than my 1980s pocket money, and needing something to dull the pain of a pressurising career, the appeal of starting over again as a spotter has taken hold.
Now living near Northampton I have a convenient base from which to visit many aerodromes and the large airports. My ever loving and understanding wife has got me underway this week, buying me a lovely 20-60x spotting scope - which saw its debut today at a couple of local airfields (more about those visits in the next post). So after a break of nearly 25 years, I am once again Plane Mad.
Welcome to the blog.
