Not all of us are total fanatics. Aerophilia strikes with levels of severity, and for some the symptoms are mild and manageable. My own case is somewhere in the middle, though maybe with millions of dollars I'd become more eccentric. Consider John Travolta, whose affliction is obviously full-blown, manifest by the actor's privately owned Boeing 707, which he captains himself on jaunts around the globe. I'm unaware of anybody else in the cultural elite so deeply invested, but those with a thing for wings include New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, columnist Alex Beam of the Boston Globe, writer Douglas Coupland and renowned journalist William Langewiesche. Coupland is particularly drawn to the mystique of crashes, while Langewiesche is a former professional pilot whose father authored a well-known book about flying.
It's difficult to say whether A.E.s share some proclivity at the genetic level, but there are common threads. Typically our infatuation began at a very young age. We're almost exclusively male, and tend to be very good at geography.
By the time I reached junior high, I'd become a hardcore planespotter. From the 16th floor observation deck at Boston's Logan Airport, armed with binoculars and a notepad, I'd log the registrations of arriving and departing planes (those numbers and letters on a plane's aft fuselage). Later, using a magic marker, I'd X out the day's tally in my fleets book. I owned at least two volumes listing the entire global fleet of commercial planes, country by country and airline by airline. The goal was to spot as many carriers, models and specific planes as possible. By 1980, I'd marked off every last Boeing 727 in the fleets of Eastern, Delta and American Airlines. How impressive is that?
The analogies to bird-watching are obvious, even uncanny, but planespotting differs in a number of ways. For one, the aluminum species tend to go extinct much more quickly than the feathered kind. By the early '80s, I came to see a definite pointlessness to amassing a checklist of aging airplanes when, in not too long a time, they'd be parked in a scrap yard awaiting the crusher. (Around this time, too, I started listening to the Dead Kennedys and Minor Threat, discovering another, even less socially acceptable way to spend my time.)
You can still purchase those fleet rosters (one company, out of Zurich, Switzerland, has been publishing for 40 years), but old-style spotting has become rare. As with so many pursuits, a somewhat altered version has taken hold in cyberspace. Virtually every aerogeek on earth is intimately familiar with the megaportal of Airliners.net, easily the Web's richest source of airliner fetish material. Proximity to an actual airport no longer matters. At Airliners, a hobbyist in rural Kansas or the Australian outback can, if only vicariously, savor the digitalized sight of an Air Koryo IL-62 or one of the last remaining 707s.
The Airliners archives contain well over a million photographs. (The vast majority showcase commercial planes, but there's a limited number of military and small craft too.) A tremendously useful search engine allows visitors to specify aircraft type, airline, location and various other subcategories, and includes the ability to look up individual planes by plugging in their registrations. This feature reveals dozens of shots of the four Boeings involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, snapped in years past. It's possible to compose a pictorial history of a particular aircraft, from airline to airline, continent to continent, over several decades. There are cockpit photos aplenty, and a section of crash and accident pics. My personal favorites are the hundreds of interior cabin depictions, showcasing the latest luxuries found in the forward quarters of the world's leading carriers.
Airliners is the brainchild of Johan Lundgren, a 32-year-old living in Lulea, in the north of Sweden. Not surprisingly, Lundgren's affection for commercial planes began in childhood. "In the early '80s my father worked for an aid organization in Zambia," he explains. "We flew back to Sweden every summer, and made stopovers in all kinds of places in Africa and Europe. All those flights, all those airlines, and all those airports are what started my interest in aviation."
Lundgren also did military service in the Swedish air force, serving as a mechanic on the Saab Viggen, a supersonic fighter. In the mid-1990s he launched an upstart Web site called Your Photos where visitors could upload shots of airplanes they had taken themselves. This later evolved into Airliners.net, formally registered by Lundgren in 1997. "The servers stood in my dorm room for many years. As of last year, Airliners is now physically located in a room in the central part of Lulea, but I still manage everything myself to keep costs down."
Most of Lundgren's visitors are from Europe and the United States, but a scroll through the forum discussions, where every post is marked by a flag representing the author's home country, is a world tour. Post a topic on whether a given airline is planning to install on-demand video in business class, and in short order the thread is likely to include opinions from the Comoros, Pakistan, Ghana and Cyprus. Like commercial aviation itself, it is all quite beautifully international.
Adds Lundgren: "We log about 250,000 unique visitors a normal day and 3 million page views. Our servers are working hard. The visitors to Airliners.net are mostly aviation hobbyists, whether working in the industry or not. Other than that we get a lot of news agency people hunting for information, as well as lots of photography buffs who simply enjoy the high and often artistic qualities of our photos."
That latter point is not to be underestimated. You needn't be an airliner enthusiast to appreciate the talent of Airliners' contributors. Some of the photography is gorgeous. Trust me, I have no vested interest in promoting Lundgren's business, especially since he and his moderators have banned me from the forums on the grounds of my advertising my column there, but as my regular readers already know, I'm prone to marking up my columns with selections from the site's archive. Airliners' linking system makes it simple, and the vastness of the stock makes it possible to illustrate almost anything. For example:
Ever wonder what a compressor stall looks like? Or check out these masterly depictions of wake turbulence, wing condensation effect and the proper touchdown technique in a powerful crosswind.
Take in the majesty of contrails at 31,000 feet (and at night), or the ghostly beauty of the Northern Lights.
Just how big is a 747, and how close should you stand to one? Speaking of size, look carefully at this Pan Am DC-10, focusing on the figure of the captain in the windscreen. Grasping the immensity of a wide-body jetliner requires a certain perspective, not normally possible from the terminal.
By the same token, just how ugly is the Airbus A380? About this ugly.
Here's a breathtaking look at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from the window of a 737, and another of the Alpine backdrop at Innsbruck, Austria.
Such dramatic photos speak for themselves, but I especially enjoy the more contextual and nuanced ones. Among my favorites is this "historical" pic from Prague in 1972. Another is this 30-year-old snapshot from Tajikistan. Is that merely a picture of airplanes, or something more? I see geography, history and aviation all at once.
In this one, you can see the Narita, Japan, airport ground crew standing in formation, giving the customary salute to the departing Iran Air SP. (Try to imagine such a thing at LaGuardia or Detroit.) Meanwhile, what's going on aboard Iberia's "Antonio Machado"? Has the first officer dropped his contact lens?
I'm uncertain about the site's copyright protocols, but it's unfortunate the media doesn't tap more regularly into Airliners' stock. Last year, the Associated Press couldn't find a picture of a Northwest Airlines DC-9 to accompany a story it did on that carrier's older jets. There are more than 2,000 of them available through Airliners. And while it might sound morbid, newspapers and magazines could present compelling pictures of the actual aircraft involved in mishaps.
If there is one confounding mystery about Airliners, it surrounds the site's most prolific contributor, a commercial photographer from Australia named Sam Chui. Chui's pictures have been viewed more than 17 million times, putting him in a category with Ansel Adams or Alfred Eisenstaedt. But it's not the volume of Chui's work that's so startling, it's his remarkable composition and the diversity of his settings. Chui seems to be in every corner of the globe at once; one day he's shooting in Tehran, Iran, and the next day he's recording this dicey takeoff of a Russian wide-body in Phuket, Thailand. Chui's travels spin a web across countless countries. Who is this international man of mystery?
And how in heck did he get this one? Or this one? Chui is a god to the Airliners crowd, and the forum let me have it one day after I mused that perhaps his more improbably angled photos -- especially his huge gallery of bird's-eye views taken at Los Angeles International -- are in some way doctored. I mean, really. Chui declined to respond for this article, but I'm told he rents a small Cessna and cruises the VFR (visual flight rules) shoreline route adjacent to LAX, outfitted with a harness and telephoto lens. However he gets his shots, all I know is I can't stop looking.
As you might figure, Airliners.net is my default browser setting, which makes it either hugely entertaining or a dangerous distraction. Lord knows how many hours I've spent trolling the site's image banks when I should have been writing. There are others who know what I'm talking about.
Johan Lundgren is a pusher. I imagine he'd be loath to agree, but there's a name for this kind of business. It's called pornography.
About the writer
Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. His column is archived here.
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