[a version of this piece appears in the June 2011 issue of
Totally Dublin: which is a great listings magazine available around the city]
Around the back of Dublin
airport, along the old airport road, there is a small layby with a mound of
grass behind it. It’s an unassuming little spot and easily missed. Yet, if you
park here and stick around for a while, you’ll soon notice that it’s one of the
busiest patches of gravel in Dublin, a
place that sees quite a cross section of the city’s life. From hatchbacks
crammed with kids high on sugar, to sleeker (somehow sadder) cars singularly
occupied by business types drinking coffee, to white vans containing men who
snooze behind Evening Heralds folded over the dashboard – it’s all here.
Everyone comes for the same reason, to watch the planes. And it is for the
planes that the little layby’s true custodians, the planespotters, come. They
are hard to miss, these men (for they are mostly men), who stand still as herons
for hours on end, observing every take-off and landing from the elevation
provided by the grass verge, and recording things by pen and lens.
I first found out about the
planespotters through my work with an eleven year old boy with autism. As a weekly treat for completed school work,
he’d get to visit somewhere in Dublin of his own choosing. That place
invariably turned out to be the layby along the old airport road. The boy, his
teacher, and I, would sit in a car, eating crisps and watching the planes land
one after the other. Each plane would appear from the exact same spot in the
clouds over the city, a tiny cross shape that slowly took on the familiar form
of a jumbo, before finally becoming astonishingly huge as it landed, yards from
our car, behind the airport fence. It’s a thrilling thing to see, something so
big, up so close, and hanging so impossibly in the air before its wheels hit
the tarmac. Indeed, Niall Moran, one of the planespotters to whom I’d later
talk tells me that it is this very thrill that first got him into
planespotting. As a young lad he’d marvel at “how the hell the things get up
in the air in the first place?” and even now, as a man in his forties, he is
taken aback by “that feeling of noise and power you get sitting at the back of
the airport watching them taking off”.
The boy I used to work with with
could identify planes by their livery (the colours on the fuselage and tailfin)
and, I soon suspected, by the very shape of their silhouette against the
clouds. “That’s an Airbus A380” he’d chirrup, and whenever his teacher and I
checked an iPhone app that pinged the details of every flight coming into
Dublin we’d see to our disbelief that he had correctly identified the tiny
speck in the sky. Later on when he returned to school, the boy would spend some
time looking at videos on youtube that were very similar to his own camera
phone creations. These videos were minimalistic, even banal, affairs - just
planes (named in the clips’ titles) moving across tarmac in a roar of ambient
noise and taking off into the sky. Yet there appeared to be an entire community
of people prepared to watch them thousands of times and leave approving
comments. It was a window into a somewhat alien world to me. This was a place
where people seemed to be obsessively devoted to recording and observing for
themselves something that could be predicted by a simple phone app. I asked
myself “what could possibly be the point?” After discovering that many of
Ireland’s planespotters and aviation enthusiasts communicate with each other on
boards.ie, I decided to make contact with a few in order to find out.
I put it to Colm (a softly spoken planespotter from Co. Clare) that advances in computer technology must surely
remove any vestige of mystery the hobby might have once had. “I suppose it
does” he says, though his tone of voice betrays that he probably doesn’t
suppose, or at least that a mystery element isn’t that important to him. “Of
course it is nice to be out somewhere and hear something interesting on the
scanner that you mightn’t expect…” I do a double take. Scanner? “Most
planespotters would have a radio scanner, yeah”, he tells me. Later, Niall (who
comes from Dublin) tells me about owning a “scanner that tells you everything
up there within a radius of two hundred miles”. Never mind stereotypes of
solitary men with yellowing notebooks and pens, these lads are pulling up
beside international airports with what can only be described as spying equipment
in their vehicles. Surely this constitutes some sort of security concern? I
find myself wondering how being close to airports with this stuff could
possibly be legal? “It’s not illegal in Ireland”, Colm says, “In Ireland it is
legal to record what you hear on the scanner too. But in the UK it is not legal
to record even though it is legal to listen”. However, he tells me that the
Gardaí don’t always realise this and that “there have been incidents in the
past where the Gardaí have wrongly confiscated equipment”. “So the guards were
getting the law wrong”, I chuckle. I’m half-tempted to launch into an anecdote
about a friend once getting a going-over about a packet of magic mushrooms that
he brought to the Electric Picnic when they were legal, but then Colm tells me
that “planespotters are reputable people”, and I worry that my anecdote might
tank.
To my mind, any hobby based on
cataloguing things needs to have an element of the unexpected to work. For
example, I used to watch the birds that visited my garden very keenly as a
youngster, making little sketches of them and identifying them in a field
guide. While I could derive no end of pleasure from the comic antics of crows,
it was the chance of seeing something extraordinary and unpredictable that truly
kept me glued to the garden, something like a bullfinch in his fire-engine red
livery landing among the dun coloured masses of sparrows. But that’s just my
mind. There is perhaps an equivalent type of joy to be found in the mere noting of something expected and predictable, a sort of tick-the-box reassurance, and there is a simpler joy again in the acquisition of beautiful things with your own eyes. Niall
communicates something of the former sort of joy when he tells me that when he
first got into planespotting it was “like a competition” for him and the other
planespotters. “You’d get very competitive comparing yourself to the next
person. It’s like ‘how many 737s have you seen? I’ve seen 800. Oh, well I’ve
seen 1,100’. You’d always want to see more than the next person”. But then he tells
me “now I’m different. I used to be like that, but now I like to take photos
more. I like to look at them to appreciate them for what they are” and he gets
at the latter sort of joy.
Although unexpected things don’t
feature heavily in planespotting, unusual things surely do. According to Niall,
a huge part of the hobby’s appeal is in getting to see rare planes or unusual
combinations of models and airlines, and travelling to see them is another part
of it. “You are always looking to see a rarity”, he says. “but at the same
time, you take what you get. A lot of people won’t go to Dublin if they want to
see a rarity. They’ll go somewhere different.” I ask him if he travels to see
planes himself. “Last year I was around the world spotting”, he says, before
his voice drops to a hushed awe, “I saw many rare things last year, thank God”.
He elaborates and tells me that he went to Sydney to experience one of the last
“remaining airworthy Lockheed Constellations in the world”. I later look this
plane up on Wikipedia. It is a magnificent thing with a curvy 1940s shape that
makes it look straight out of a World War II movie. I can understand the
fascination. Colm travels too, and tells me that he goes to Lanzarote to see
planes, explaning that “it is a great spot because the approach is right over
the beach and there is a great selection”. A holiday where you can
simultaneously sit on a sunny beach and enjoy your hobby? Who couldn’t see an
appeal in that?
All this sounds quite a way from
the stereotypes of planespotting being a hobby for loners in anoraks. I ask
both men what they think of this stereotype. Colm says he’s aware of the
“anorak” stereotype but can’t see what is strange about a hobby that is not
that different from many others when you think of it “lots of people like
looking at things, cars, trains, or soccer matches. We just like looking at
planes”. Niall, when asked, laughs and says “listen, if you want weird, there
are guys out there who stand out along the road and take down the registration
of buses. Look, for every weird hobby there is one weirder”. I make a
surreptitious note – potential Totally Dublin article.
Most
people (if they don’t live near airports, that is) are used to seeing planes in
their natural habitat, where they appear very small, sometimes so small that
you can only see the vapour trails they leave. As I’ve already mentioned, and
as any planespotter will tell you, this is no way to see a plane. Up close,
they are marvellous. They are like huge toys - shiny, noisy, and best of all, capable
of flying. That is why if you visit the layby behind Dublin airport to see the
planes, you will notice not only the faces of children in cars filled with
simple glee, but the faces of their parents filled with it too. And I strongly
recommend that you do visit, because it is one of the best free shows in
Dublin. Bring a packed lunch and a flask of something to drink and remember to
say hello to the planespotters. They’re an interesting bunch.
your author and a beautiful little nephew who is one year old today.
