Once again I can't decide who's more nuts: ... the photographers who are jostling each other to get closer to the runway for a good tight shot...
I was one of them crazies. "Plane spotting" was my passion for many years. On good days I would go to the airport before or after work and sometimes even during my lunch break (hum nothing better than to eat lunch surrounded by the sweet smell of jet fuel...
). When going on vacation, my first question always was, how's the plane spotting there... You get the picture.
I took thousands upon thousands of pictures over many years. I may even have a picture of one of the retired commercial pilots lurking around here in my collection
(especially if you operated on the east coast for one of the majors in the late 1990's, early 2000's). Some of my pictures have been published on various "spotting" websites, some I have traded with fellow photographers from around the world (Sweden, France, Switzerland, Italy,...) some have been used in airline manuals and on airport websites, and some pilots have asked me for pictures of aircraft they used to pilot. It was so much fun!
Of course, 9/11 changed everything. Lurking around the airport perimeter with a huge bazooka-looking photo lens raises red flags immediately nowadays, particularly in the US. So that was that.
