Welcome to Aeronumerology
Aero Numerology the art of Aircraft Number and Registration collecting, a hobby not for the faint of heart!
Image Copyright © The Drew Wilson Collection
Collecting aircraft registrations and serial numbers is a hobby, it probably has been since the first registration was assigned to an aircraft.
In Britain, the Royal Observer Corps was formed in 1925. The first reference to the hobby seems to appear sometime around 1940, but I personally know two Plane Spotters that were spotting in the mid to late 1930’s.
Originally everything had to be done by hand, using a pencil and a notebook. The hobby with its focus and fascination with numbers and technical aspects, was for most of my early years a male preserve. Not only male, but when I started almost exclusively British.
Things have moved on, with all kinds of technology enhancing the pencil and notebook, the advent of the DSLR, spotters from countries other than Britain, reasonable cost optical equipment and shock horror – Lady Spotters!
The hobby it has to be said seems to be increasing in popularity, although there are not as many young people as I would have expected – so it is probably down to people with more free time.
Whatever you collect, whether it’s just numbers, types, fleets, production lists or just the whole lot. You’re a spotter and probably an aeronumerologist, collecting information as part of a hobby that you find enjoyable.
Whether you use a pencil and a note book or a computer makes no difference, all the ways of collecting the information deliver a certain satisfaction.
What does your log say about you
So what does your log say about you, what information do you collect. When I started spotting in the mid 1960’s, all that you really had was a pencil and a note book. Now your log can be on a card system, a computer, online or it can still be in a note book.
What a spotter records about a sighting is a personal thing, there used to be a ready to buy spotters log book. The “Ian Allen Aerolog”, from memory it only had four columns and it only cost 1/- that is a shilling or 5p to you youngsters out there.
So if you had 5p and a pencil, you could be a plane spotter. Of course that was the hook that got you in, nobody realised that they would spend the rest of their life buying more and more stuff that you didn’t really need.
Things have changed over the years and although there is a good spotting community in the UK, it has changed much from the days when I started.
With the advent of new technologies and the web forums along with email and a whole plethora of other communication means, people have moved on – the main interests seem to revolve around photography and keeping a log seems secondary for many.
Plane Spotting Destinations
Plane spotting destinations, well if your not too bothered about getting close to the Aircraft then your garden will probably suffice if you have a smart phone.
You can spot aircraft from literally anywhere, on a clear day you can see an aircraft trail from more than 100 miles away if conditions are right.
You can obviously travel to your local airport, you can find out about the local spotting groups as well. Either by talking to other people at the local vantage points around the airport, they’ll probably be spotters or on social media where there are groups for most airports.
There have been a number of major blows to plane spotters, over the past 50 years or so. The major defense cuts of the late 1960’s reducing the numbers of military aircraft, the advent of the wide body jet reducing the the number of commercial aircraft. These changes have filtered through as a reduction in the numbers and variety of types of aircraft around.
In the early 2000’s it was all change as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, all of a sudden being a spotter made you unwelcome at an airfield and likely to be reported to the police for behaving suspiciously.
Even 20 years later there are still issues with spotting at some airfields, where before spotting was never an issue. Technology and the availability of information has made the hobby much more accessible, but 50 years ago it was probably more interesting and more fun.
But the hobby is now probably better patronised and more accessible than it ever was, the advent of cheap air travel and technology have given a boost to its popularity.
With some reasonable and not very expensive optical equipment, it is possible to see quite a lot. The photographs below were taken from the car park of a hotel on San Francisco Bay, probably well over a mile from the line of the approach to the airport. These photographs were taken with an inexpensive compact camera, the camera was less than £100 and not much bigger than a packet of cigarettes.
The Photographs on this site.
All the photographs on the site belong to someone, if you see one that you want get in touch and ask.
Most spotters are quite happy to let people have a copy of a photograph for personal use, but it should be noted that some may not wish to share photographs for various reasons.
It is courteous to ask nonetheless, the majority of the photographs on the site are available to view at reduced resolutions, most are available as scanned or from camera at much higher resoulutions.
The technology of phography has changed massively over the past 20 years let alone the past 50 years, digital is now the norm. But there are probably millions of paper prints and negatives out there, these can be digitised and made available for the general community – if they don’t end up in landfill as so often happens.
Photography is quite a personal aspect of the hobby, so some collections are fairly narrow in scope and others are much more eclectic and wide ranging.
There have been some fantastic advances in photography in recent years, especially as far as the technology goes. The ability to easilly capture a high resolution photograph on a mobile phone hase given almost anyone the ability to take relatively high quality shots.
But the wealth of historical stuff out there is just as important, as someone who has come into posession of a number of archives I have looked at the sheer volume of stuff and wondered how I’ll get through it – but eventually I will and it will appear here and on the gallery site aeronumerology.net.
I tend to scan and present the photographs as they are, my personal preferences for editing or enhancing the photographs may not be to everyones taste.
