It’s all in the book!
This is the first in a series of posts, they are about your plane spotting log. I have nearly all my old log books going back to the mid 1960’s, but I do have all the data that I collected or found out. Something alas that may be more difficult in the future due to Air Mobility Command policy, still we shall see. Now before I get into these posts, it is very important that I stress there is no one size fits all solution when it comes to plane spotting.
If you have a system that works for you, stay with it – change for the sake of change is not a good idea. If you see a better way, it may be that you take it. I myself have been through several iterations of what is generally termed a Master Log, from an A-4 ledger book, to my current database there were no less than five Master Logs. And with the first four there were hard lessons to learn, there might even be more to come.
Times have changed – but not much!
Plane Spotting in the 1960’s and 70’s meant a visit to an Airport. A long weekend trip in a coach or a minibus could generate a log with a thousand entries. It wasn’t uncommon to fill a couple of pages when you spent an hour at some places. But a contrail, or an aircraft going over the top – well you could pretty much forget them. Very occassionally you would get a good heads up, but that was the exception rather than the rule.
Now, you can be anywhere and if you can see it you can identify it and log it. Even sitting pretty much in the middle of nowhere, if you can get a signal from a cell tower you are good to go. If conditions are right, I could probably log two hundred and fifty a day and that is without an airport visit.
Paper still works
A paper system will always work, the issue is that it will become unwieldy quite quickly. To remedy this you need to have some way of indexing, whether that is by type or country or any method doesn’t matter it can only take you so far – it never stops working it just becomes over whelming. Regardles of which system that you choose paper or electronic, you will find that there are drawbacks.
So if you have a paper log there is a decision to make at some point, do I stay with paper or go with an electronic system.
Next Post
In the next post, we’ll examine the advantages and disadvantages of a number of ways of logging.