Quotes & Research
 

Page One Feature

By DANIEL MICHAELS and ANDY PASZTOR
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
 Not long after Sept. 11, security guards at the Las Vegas airport received a worrisome tip: Travelers had spied a strange man on top of a parking garage, studying the runway through binoculars.Rushing to the scene, the guards confronted white-haired Michael Wright. Not to worry, the British engineer explained. He was a "plane spotter," an aviation buff passionately devoted to jotting down aircraft registration numbers. The flummoxed guards said he could carry on but asked him to please move someplace less conspicuous.The terrorist hijackings that so dramatically changed the world of aviation also altered the lives of enthusiasts who ogle jetliners for sport. Overwhelmingly male, and predominately British, this obscure fraternity is adjusting to a big change: America's airports are no longer the best places for their offbeat pursuit, and Europe is getting tougher, too. "The days of driving around the outside of airports are gone," laments Colin Barrat, a 24-year plane-spotting veteran from Leicester, England, who happened to be sitting in a van with five friends outside the Palm Beach, Fla., airport on Sept. 11.Before, plane spotters loved the U.S. for its multitude of flights, its often-sunny climes and its rather laissez-faire attitude toward airport security. These days, British plane spotters are, grudgingly, staying closer to home, where the hobby was born. It evolved from train spotting, the quintessential eccentric British hobby, which first appealed to working-class boys looking for entertainment during the bleak years of World War II.Every aircraft has an individual registration number printed on its tail. It is difficult for the uninitiated to grasp, but true believers talk about a compulsion, comparable to the drive of avid bird watchers, to record as many sightings of different planes as possible. "My wife doesn't understand, but at least look at the places we go -- we've been all over the world," says Colin Croucher, a retired English police officer and 30-year spotter. "Every year we go to Majorca and go to a hotel at the end of the runway. She goes down to the beach, and I spot."Plane spotting has devotees in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Japan, though few in the U.S. The truly obsessed boast about viewing tens of thousands of different jetliners, painstakingly documenting the sightings in frayed notebooks. Barry Dymock, a burly regular in the observation area at London's Heathrow airport, has collected 18,000 so-called tail numbers in 38 countries and lines his house with shelves full of notebooks and plane guides.Mr. Dymock's fancy took flight at age 10, and he's been at it for 35 years since. "I had a break when I discovered girls," he says, with only a hint of a smile through his bushy mustache. "Then I got married, and went back to it." The British Airways baggage handler boasts of one lucky July Fourth weekend at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, when he plied a parking attendant with chocolates and British tabloids for permission to spend the day perched on the roof of a parking structure overlooking a pair of runways.Spotters endure the sarcasm of co-workers and the complaints of spouses to claim bragging rights among their peers. A risky version of the sport focusing on military aircraft landed 14 British and Dutch citizens in Greek prison cells for nearly a month late last year. They were initially accused of espionage for taking pictures and scribbling notes while prowling around a military air show in southeastern Greece. But after British diplomats strenuously argued that it was just a cultural misunderstanding, the charges were reduced to illegal information collecting, a misdemeanor. Greece released the spotters before Christmas.For the less adventurous, the Renaissance Hotel next to Heathrow airport offers a "Plane Spotter Break" weekend special, which guarantees an unobstructed runway view. In 2001, the hotel booked more than 350 rooms at $135 per night. The sales pitch: "The only thing we overlook is the airport."Several companies organize plane spotting-focused outings. In December, Mr. Wright, who had the unfortunate experience in Las Vegas, and 21 other English spotters paid spotting-trip specialist Aeroprints Ltd. of Hampshire, England, $60 each to visit airports near Paris. They traveled by bus and boat from Heathrow, catching some shut-eye on the nine-hour trip.Rolling up to Paris's Le Bourget airfield, where Charles Lindbergh touched down after his historic 1927 solo Atlantic crossing, they trotted to the wire fence separating airport runways from roads with the excitement of kids nearing a fairground. Binoculars at the ready, they started calling out plane models and numbers. They scribbled furiously in their notebooks, comparing the sightings to other planes they had seen.As the enthusiasts congregated on an airport perimeter road, a police officer leaned out of the window of his white van to inquire about what they were up to. A soldier in camouflage, holding a machine gun in the back seat, listened with curiosity. The officer quickly let the men go about their business, comfortable they didn't pose a security threat but perplexed by how they spend their spare time. "C'est bizarre," he said, shrugging his shoulders.Dave Pickles, 56, who recently retired as a cost accountant for a jet-engine repair firm near Manchester, England, to take up spotting full time, concedes that "the whole idea is kind of compulsive." But he adds: "Smacking a little white ball around on the grass in special shoes certainly is no more silly."Los Angeles International Airport used to be a hub for spotting fanatics, with its open-air, 1960-vintage observation deck, offering a panoramic view of all gates, taxiways and both sets of parallel runways. One floor below is the stylish Encounter restaurant, complete with a circular bar, where bartender Ramon Gonzales recalls serving as many as 200 or 250 spotters a week. One New Zealand visitor, according to Mr. Gonzales, used to go on three-day binges, spending all daylight hours on the observation deck and then drinking the night away in the bar. "The guy's notebook was as thick as the Bible," says waiter Christopher Almonte. The observation deck has been closed since Sept. 11. The number of spotters visiting the bar, which reopened in late November, has slowed to barely a trickle.The story is similar at other U.S. airports. "Smaller U.S. airports used to be quite good. You could walk right out to the gate," says Glyn Parlane, a foreign-exchange banker in London on a "Plane Spotter Break" at the Heathrow hotel. His fond hope is that spotting will return to normal. "We don't do anything that might arouse suspicion," he says. "What we do is perfectly innocent."

Write to Daniel Michaels at dan.michaels@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor andy.pasztor@wsj.com