There’s a new ‘in thing’ on You Tube. As someone who is rarely anywhere near the cutting edge of anything, it’s weird to be part of a growing phenomenon, which is watching planes take off and land. I’ve been a fan of watching planes take off and land for a very long time, although not for as long as I have been watching trains; another hobby in which I indulge myself both on line and in person, so to speak. There are some great websites to watch trains, like Railcam, to which I subscribe at a mere £30 a year but at the moment most plane taking off and landing sites are free. And I love them.
I started watching planes at Bristol Airport when it was called Lulsgate Airport. It was in the pre easyJet/RyanAir days when you were lucky if you saw three jets taking off all day. Air travel had not yet been made more complicated by psychopathic islamist maniacs so there was barely any security. There was even an outdoor area from which you could watch planes take off. There may not have been many of them, but you could hear and smell those wonderful old engines as they belched out thick smoke when taking off. Those were the days, eh?
Anyway, going to Corfu in 1985 changed everything. With one end of the runway jutting out to sea and Corfu Town at the other end, and with numerous viewing points, some high above the airport, this was anorak heaven. It was then my hobby became a slight obsession. As with trains, I never went as far as taking the numbers of the planes. I just couldn’t be arsed. Seeing and hearing them was enough.
I moved on to You Tube, where there are thousands, maybe even millions, of videos of planes doing various things, including crashing, not that I am interested in the latter. Rarely a day goes by without me taking in an onboard video of a flight, taking off or landing, often to and from somewhere I have been or will be going to. We are going to Canada later this year and I don’t think there is a landing in Toronto on You Tube that I haven’t seen, probably several times. This was all fine and dandy, but now you can watch stuff live from airports all round the world.
The You Tube channel that really started off this wave of airport streaming sites is Jerry Dyer’s Big Jet TV. His You Tube channel is free but there is a premium version costing a fiver a month. Plenty of us have been watching Jerry’s excellent channel for ages but it really took off. literally, during Storm Eunice, as Jerry’s brilliant commentaries described the efforts of planes trying to land at Heathrow in a near hurricane. Since then, things have only got better.
Every morning, I check how things are going in Lanzarote before turning my attention to Madeira, where there are two live channels broadcasting every day. Then, there’s Tenerife North, Birmingham, Manchester. Los Angeles and occasionally Schiphol. If it’s a grim, rainy day, I can always enjoy planes taking off somewhere nice. In fact, when it’s a beautiful sunny day, like this one, I’m still inspecting the overseas airport streams. Why? Because I can.
I often wonder why so many of us love watching planes flying. For someone like me, who believes in science without understanding very much of it, I think it’s something to do with the age-old question: how the hell does that thing get off the ground? Having read about the theory of lift and about just how powerful aircraft engines are, I suppose it’s logical, but it’s still very exciting, pretty well unique. No one sits outside a bus station waiting to see a bus leave to another part of the city and anyway if a bus breaks down, it just stops. If a plane breaks down – well, you know the rest.
In the summer, it gets even better with various pop-up sites appearing on You Tube. I spent far too much time in my man cave last summer watching the action at Corfu airport when I probably should have been doing something else.
Anyway, I have to go now because things are hotting up in Lanzarote and Madeira and the last thing I want to do is miss what’s going on.
