Before writing this post, I had a long time thinking what my favorite place on an airport it. This is not a easy thing to determine as there are so many different interesting and funny places to be !Driving beside or even on runways (with a clearance, for sure) is good...
Walking arround planes at their stands offers the possiblity to see each and every details of them...
The view from control tower is definetily breathtaking...
But THE place to be is withing the approach light system. You know, this series of lights that extend for 900 meters from runway end, guiding pilots for the very final part of the approach.
Getting there is not an easy thing as this is in the sensitive area, and only people doing maintenance of the lights are allowed to go there, as well as the Instrument Landing System (ILS) technicians. But the place is really good, as it is the closes place in the runway axis you can access.
If you're facing take-offs, depending the runway lenght and type of aircraft taking off, you can have kind of a "face to face" with the pilots, and beleive me, they will see you as well.
But landings seen from there is really a paramount experience, as airplanes pass above you, at a height of about 10 to 15 meters with reduced power, gliding down to the runway, with light on, gear down... really exciting. After the plane passes, you can even hear the wake turbulence moving air arround, and feel those vortexes...
Far far away in time is the era where it was possible to buy a sandwich at noon and go there to eat it looking at planes (the new safety era...) but each opportunity to go there is a good time granted.
Both photos in this post are from the excellent www.airliners.net website, which photo database is fed by spotters worldwide, and has more that 1'000'000 photos in.
More about the spotters in the next post...
