Eyes Aloft: The Sublime Obsession of Plane Spotting

[Correction: In the original publication of this issue, we misidentified Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport as the site from which Amelia Earhart took off on her ill-fated 1937 flight around the world. She departed from Miami Municipal Airport, the site of which lies two miles south.]

In April 2014, a New York Times reporter passing through Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport spotted a small plane sporting a tiny but unmistakable American flag on its tail. Because of sanctions limiting commercial interaction between the US and Iran, the stars and stripes were a jarring and mysterious detail, enough to warrant a dispatch in the paper headlined “Iran Gets an Unlikely Visitor, an American Plane, but No One Seems to Know Why.”

Reports credited spotters, for whom the “tracking of planes has become a kind of global sport,” with providing images and information that tracked the plane’s prior movements. Photographs culled from JetPhotos.net and other online databases revealed that the plane had been sighted in Zurich, around the time of the World Economic Forum; previously it was spotted heading to Ghana from the UK. Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) records showed that the plane was registered under a Bank of Utah trust, which had shielded the identity of the true owners.

After the New York Times coverage revealed that a Ghanaian mining company headed by the brother of that country’s president had used the aircraft to travel to Tehran, an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman clarified that there were no Americans on the plane. The Ghanaian mining company that leased the plane from the Bank of Utah trust insisted that they had not violated any FAA regulations, but according to US officials, concerns remained about the legality and transparency of an American-registered plane being used for any commercial or diplomatic purposes in Iran. These points would have never come to light if not for the pictures snapped in London, Zurich, and Tehran. With all the questions left unanswered in the Mehrabad affair, one thing was certain: If no one had spotted it, the plane wouldn’t have existed.

Plane spotters—or “avgeeks,” as some call themselves—travel around the world in order to hang out near airport runways so that they can watch and document planes as they take off and land. Before the advent of the internet, spotters would meet up at conventions or connect in the back pages of enthusiast magazines in order to trade mounted film slides of their best shots. Now they post pictures on online forums such as Airliners.net, PlaneSpotters.net, and JetPhotos.net, as well as on Flickr and Facebook groups dedicated to the art and practice of aviation enthusiasm.

The details they collect provide an open-source trove of data about global commerce and politics, which has been invaluable to journalists and whistleblowers (not to mention various intelligence-gathering agencies) seeking to identify planes and their passengers. When Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s private plane flew to Florida in the summer of 2014, his visit was documented by spotters at Miami International, which allowed reporters to predict the return of LeBron James to his hometown. In December 2014, spotting data helped analysts track unlisted flights between Tel Aviv and the United Arab Emirates, despite the fact that Israel had a limited diplomatic relationship with the monarchies of Persian Gulf

Photographs by MIKE KELLEY

states. In the fall of 2015, Israel announced it would be opening it’s first diplomatic mission in the UAE. In 2007, Tunisian blogger Astrubal searched plane-spotting sites for Tunisia’s presidential plane. His crowdsourced effort revealed that although the president had made only three state-sanctioned trips, the plane had left the country more than ten times, with visits to European capitals where there was no record of official business. Astrubal’s conclusion that the president or his family was abusing Tunisia’s plane for pleasure exacerbated the tensions that led to the overthrow of the authoritarian government, the...