They express their passion for aviation by taking pictures of planes, mostly from the airport fence. On good days, you can have dozen, if not hundreds of them, especially if there are some special planes scheduled.
Some of them are equipped with radio scanners to monitor the traffic, and even some radar-like (ADS-B) receivers to prepare their shots.
This could look like a strange hobby, but I must admit that they are really serious at it. Have a look at www.airliners.net, you will see how good their pictures are.
And please don't think this is useless, it even had strategical issues... do you remind when CIA was accused to illegaly transport war prisonners accross europe ? Some spotters could prove using their pictures that the agency did illegaly used the same plane with different registrations within days. How ? Because the spotters photos are so good that they could unambiguously identify the planes by their antenna locations, and also because of the scratches on the fuselage !
There is also a second kind of spotting activity, which is a bit harder for me to understand, which consists in noting the aircraft registrations seen by the spotter. At some airports with public observation desks, you can see them, with binoculars, looking at planes, then flipping pages of their booklets to tick the registration they just saw... and get very excited if this is a new one.
Some spotters club even require a certain ammount of new registration seen per member, otherwise the "bad" member no seeing enough new planes gets excluded !
During some renovations at Heathrow, the fence was coverd by kind of opaque plastic film, and the authority has been asked and pressured by spotters associations to do some holes in that, so they could continue their favorite activity ! That's how powerfull this funny lobby is.
The guy on this picture is a typical spotter being spotted in action... He is in fact Kurt Gorm Larsen, the editor of www.plane-spotter.com, another spotters website. And yes, that equipment is quite usual amongts spotters as they have to shoot their pictures from quite fare away, behind the fence.
