What counts as "Spotting" an aircraft?

[dee-jay]

As a 70+ year old that has had a major heart attack and live on the coast of Suffolk I can no longer afford or be able to drive for the hundreds of miles to do all the airfields that I would like to go to you have to dot spot or stop being interested in aircraft. On another
view on our hobby is do you count everything in Amarc from a fly over as a lot of the aircraft wear complete covers these days also there are a lot of fuselage with no wings or tails so what do you count ???


dee-jay

[DAVEBRAD]

Surely its what ever you want it to be, its just a harmless hobby... there are no rules..

This. For me, a visual is a visual. Serials don't have to be seen to be counted although when not confirmed, I mark it down as a question mark (e.g. typhoons on adsb)

I personally do not take serials based solely on adsbexchange ( honest ) but it is not a new dilemma for I am sure many of us enjoyed seeing C-141s flying over and hearing "MAC 50265" going WOD-DVR or LAM-WOD etc. Can anyone remember the Air Scotland mag which was a must for the 'Over the Oggin' section.

Oh what fun.

or more fun, early hours listening on a short wave- drat that burst of static just as the number was called...

[DAVEBRAD]

Some years ago at an Oceana airshow, a US Navy cop (as wide as he was tall) came up to me and asked what I was doing. "Recording the tail-numbers" I replied. "You aren't allowed to do that" he said, as took my notebook and tore out the two pages I had written on that day. "What about all these people with their cameras?" I asked. "Oh yes, that's perfectly fine" he replied. "I can photograph anything?" I asked. "Yes, feel free" he said. Out with the camera with the extra-long lens, and in went about a hundred photos of close-ups of the lower rear fuselages of row upon row of F/A-18. Job done.

Happy to admit to being a sphotter that day!

i got pulled up by a civvy police inspector for looking through a hangar window, who insisted on me accompanying him to 2 RAF officers selling patches at a Finningley open day way back, when he reported me with pride, oh how his face changed when one of the officers said "what do you think all these people are here for? perhaps its to look at our aircraft"...

[Colbytheplaneguy]

I think the fun in plane spotting is that it can be whatever you want it to be. No restrictions means that you are not pressured to full fill a criteria, which is hard when some of us do not have the experience to know exactly what to look for.

P.S Shout out to the older generation of plane spotters for their patience in teaching us though lock down!

[freebirduk]

Great thread. I've always wondered what other folks "rules" are.

Back in the day I was considering writing software to support spotting (ended up doing it just for me). It was quite a design dilemma figuring out what most people do. For example, do you spot the airframe (so you only log it once) or the identity (so you log paint jobs / operators)? Just one photo per airframe or many?

On the "what is a plane" issue I personally exclude balloons, gliders, UAVs and microlights. What's a microlight? Well, if the CAA says it's a microlight then that does it for me.

Can this platform do surveys? It would be interesting (mildly) to see what proportion of folks do what. Happy to put together a set of questions if the tools are available.

[Seahornet1]

Wow, it's a whole new hobby....

Plane-spotter spotting!

[fatherfaff]

I personally do not take serials based solely on adsbexchange ( honest ) but it is not a new dilemma for I am sure many of us enjoyed seeing C-141s flying over and hearing "MAC 50265" going WOD-DVR or LAM-WOD etc. Can anyone remember the Air Scotland mag which was a must for the 'Over the Oggin' section.

Yep, I was a schoolkid in Edinburgh and still have my log of "Overflies". Usually it just had something like the date, time, aircraft type (if identified) and direction headed. If I was lucky I could tie it up with the Air Scotland mag or other sources and perhaps 1 in 20 could be matched ie. 20/6/76 1601 T-43A heading south east ided as 71-1404 or on 23/4/76 C-141A 66-0149 heading for the States.