Plane Crazy

As a stay-at-home dad on Fridays, I sometime struggle to find interesting and worthwhile things to do with my nineteen-month-old son. He's at that awkward age where he has started walking and (almost) talking, but also still needs two naps a day and is prone to needing his nappy changing at inopportune moments.

One of his current obsessions (like most small boys of his age) is mechanical things such as diggers, cranes and lorries. We were driving through Yeadon a few weeks ago, when I wondered whether he would be interested in watching the planes taking off and landing at Leeds Bradford Airport. At the very least, the noise of jets passing overhead would keep him occupied for a while.

After a quick search on the internet, using the power of the iPhone, it became clear that there is a one major spot where people in Leeds with a lot of time on their hands go to watch planes. I headed for the cheerfully-named Cemetery Road in Yeadon, where a layby overlooking the runway offers great views of passing air traffic.



Strictly speaking, no-one is supposed to park there, because it's double yellow lines. As a fellow plane-spotter sagely observed to me, if a traffic warden wandered up there, they'd have a field day. But it seems to be pretty well-established as a local tourist attraction, complete with an attendant ice-cream van. It's a pity people don't look after it a bit better though - the ground is littered with broken glass and litter, and people clamber over the cemetery wall to get a better view of the jets passing overhead. It must be a bit galling if you've driven over to put flowers on your grandmother's grave, to then have to weave your way past plane-spotters eating Soleros and playing loud trance from their Honda Civics.

There is also a hard-core of plane-spotters who clearly spend a lot of time hanging around this spot armed with enormous telephoto lenses and and ham radio equipment. They spend a lot of time in their cars, fiddling with antennae and listening to Leeds Bradford air-traffic control. They also serve as a useful early-warning system for when a plane is about to take off or land, because they get excited and twitchy, dashing out of their cars and scanning the sky with binoculars.

Now, call me a nerd, but watching a 40-ton jet flying over your head at a few hundred feet is undeniably quite exciting. Landings are quite a surreal experience in this particular spot, because the plane's engines are running at lower power, therefore its approach is quite silent. It arrives out of nowhere, and suddenly the sky is filled with a huge aircraft, seemingly headed straight for you. It's a heady experience.

Takeoffs, when the wind is in the right direction, are equally exciting. Depending on which way the windsock is blowing, the planes taxi very close to the waiting spectators, before gunning their engines to full power. At that close range, you can really feel the force of jets, like standing next to the bass speakers at a concert. It seems at the moment inconceivable that the huge plane in front you will actually be able to leave the ground. Then the roar deepens, and slowly, the plane begins to rumble down the runway, gathering speed until it leaves the ground.

I'm not a fan of flying in planes - given the choice, I'd much rather stand on the ground watching them. Hanging around with my Max Power and CB Radio chums gave me a fresh perspective on this phobia. I think flying in planes is actually too exciting to be an entirely comfortable experience. It actually doesn't feel right that people are sat reading Heat magazine while thousands of pounds of thrust are preparing to blast you three miles high into the stratosphere.

I wouldn't go as far as Will Self, who suggested that the inflight movie plays the 'Beyond The Infinite' sequence from 2001 as you take off, but I think a bit of razzmatazz definitely wouldn't go amiss. Just so long as I didn't have to sit next to a fellow plane-spotter throughout the entire flight.

CN