By Laura Hayden, EAA 1578641
I’ve been gawking at airplanes since I was old enough to toddle along with my dad at the airport. My dad was a large-engine diesel mechanic by trade, and though I didn’t realize it until recently, he was also a certifiable avgeek in his spare time. I inherited the avgeek DNA from him, and while he was alive, we spent a lot of time together watching airplanes, going to see once-in-a-lifetime aircraft like the SR-71 Blackbird and WWII P-51 Mustangs at the EAA fly-in convention, and consuming content in aviation magazines (we didn’t have YouTube yet).
As an adult, I carry on his legacy. I have grown up and become deeply involved in the hobby of planespotting. So much so that I was recently elected as the vice president of the O’Hare Airport Watch (referred to as “ORD Airport Watch” and “OAW”), a volunteer organization, similar to a neighborhood watch, dedicated to planespotting that was established in 2010.
I accidentally stumbled into becoming a member of ORD Airport Watch in the summer of 2021. As I was emerging from the pandemic and from a long period of traumatic life experiences that decimated my mental and physical health, I spent most of my days at home resting, cocooned from the world in a pile of blankets and pillows watching every episode of Air Disasters on the Smithsonian Channel. This morbid fascination with aviation accidents and the engineering and human factors behind them lured me down the rabbit hole of aviation content on YouTube in order to feed my insatiable curiosity.
Thanks to the magic of YouTube’s algorithm, I discovered several aviation live-streamers who dedicate long hours to live-streaming from various airports worldwide, and their broadcasts both educated and captivated me. They were where I learned that my burning passion for aviation made me an “avgeek,” and that my lifelong obsession with watching, tracking, and photographing airplanes was called “planespotting.” They were also where I learned countless tidbits about aviation engineering, airport operations, and air traffic control, and where I discovered the tools of the avgeek trade: FlightRadar24, LiveATC, and JetTip.
I quickly found a couple of favorite channels: BigJet TV out of Heathrow (where a piece of my heart lives), and The Curious Spotter, whose streams were all from ORD. Through The Curious Spotter’s livestreams, I discovered the ORD Airport Watch group. When I went to their website and learned that anyone can become a member, I immediately joined and purchased my first “real” camera and lens kit for planespotting. With my phone loaded up with FlightRadar24, JetTip, and LiveATC, and my camera bag stuffed with my new gear, I was ready to get down to O’Hare to join in the fun.
Planespotting is the kind of hobby where one’s enjoyment increases exponentially when you have others to share it with. ORD Airport Watch exists to bring the aviation enthusiast community together and advance the hobby of planespotting, while partnering with security and law enforcement to observe, record, and report any suspicious activity occurring around the outside of the airport, much like a neighborhood watch. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
Airport Watch members undergo a background check and receive an ID badge from the Bensenville Police Department, on the back of which is a phone number we call to report anything untoward that we observe. Our membership also grants us permission to “loiter” at a variety of prime locations surrounding ORD. If we’re out spotting and security approaches us, all we need to do is to be wearing our orange safety vests and to show them our badge, and, because of our cooperative relationship with law enforcement, security officers don’t ask us to leave.
The membership of OAW is made up of a variety of people of all ages and from all walks of life, united by their passion for aviation. As our member Gerri Stultz puts it, “The allure of aviation includes the wonder of these flying machines –their ability to fly, the engineering to keep them airborne, and finally landing safely, all while transporting people, pets, and cargo all around the world.”
I have always felt an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder at the extraordinary miracle that flight is. We humans figured out how to take gargantuan machines weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds and propel them through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, and we made those big metal birds look darn good while they’re doing it! This sense of wonder brings planespotters into the avgeek world, and it’s one thing that also drives them to come back for more.
Some of our members have been planespotting for longer than I’ve been alive. John Meneely started planespotting with his friends in 1971 in Dublin, Ireland. Their objective in those days was to log every single tail number of every single airplane that they could see, and then aim to log all the aircraft in a given airline’s fleet. He graduated to taking photos in 1977, and because he will take photos of literally any aircraft anywhere, he has amassed a staggering collection of around 25,000 slides, roughly the same number of prints, and nearly 500,000 digital images taken all over the world. If it flies, John probably has a photo of it! I’m envious of all his photographs of DC-10s and 747s wearing classic liveries like the American Airlines “Eagle” livery (my favorite livery of all time) and the United Airlines “tulip”.
I started making trips down to ORD from my home in the Madison, Wisconsin, area during the summer of 2021 and began making friends in the planespotting community. Immediately, I discovered other people who found joy and satisfaction in things like how awesome the Boeing 777 landing gear is; capturing zoomed-in, perfectly sharp shots of a 747’s enormous main landing gear’s tires smoking upon touchdown; following the flight of a special aircraft coming into ORD and being there to witness it together; analyzing the day’s air traffic flow both in the air around the airport and on the ground; and the sounds of our favorite jet engines spooling up, carried across the airfield and into our ears by the wind. Not to mention the smell of jet A-1! For me, being out at the airport spotting and taking in the complex choreography that is airport operations is one of the most exhilarating things I do.
The people of the planespotting community often find that their hobby morphs into something much more. OAW member Harry Marinov considers it to be a lifestyle that he shares with his fellow avgeeks, who have become good friends of his. Living 15 minutes away from the airport, he would frequently ride his bike over during the pandemic and take videos of aircraft with his phone. He then created a YouTube channel (O’Hare Planespotting) to post the videos he took and upgraded to a camcorder to get better quality footage. He loves sharing exciting aviation events with his friends, such as inaugural flights for new airline routes, or chasing a special livery to catch it as it arrives or departs.
When I jumped into the planespotting world in 2021, I initially just wanted to learn proper photography and videography for my enjoyment. But seeing what other avgeeks all over the world have created out of their passion online inspired me to consider how I could integrate aviation into a way to make a living (as someone with no work experience in the aviation world). I created my own YouTube channel, Atypical Adventures Travel, and also am pursuing a BA in Communication Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh to open up multiple career paths in or closely connected to the aviation industry.
The future of ORD Airport Watch looks bright. Our new board is now in place, with five of the seven board seats occupied by new board members. With renewed energy, we are all exceptionally committed to increasing our membership and the diversity of our members, improving our organizational processes, increasing our public outreach, and creating new events and experiences for our members to participate in. Hopefully, one of those experiences will be a group trip to AirVenture!
2024 is going to be an exciting year for our organization, and I would like to invite the readers of the EAA blog to check us out online:
Connect with Laura and follow her OAW adventures on LinkedIn.