It’s a deeply knowledgeable community similar to “people who drink wine and know where the wine comes from just by tasting it,” Peter says. “You hear a plane, and you’re able to tell which engines they are—and by the engines, you know, oh, it’s this model of plane. And if it’s this model of plane, then you know it’s arriving at this time, and it’s this airline.”
Often the best vantage points for plane spotting are through chain-link fences around tarmac perimeters, or from the top of strategically positioned hillsides—and, occasionally, require some trespassing. In this world it’s well known which airports are friendly toward plane spotters, but two people I spoke to have been escorted off other properties by security guards.
With its observation deck and heated infinity pool directly overlooking the runways at JFK’s busy Terminal 5, the TWA hotel rooftop is a bucket list perch. “You get all these views of these incredible planes taking off from the runway and you have the Manhattan skyline behind you,” says Brandon Cross, a plane spotter from Miami who turned to the hobby when he couldn’t afford pilot training but still wanted to pursue a passion for aviation. “I mean, it’s iconic.”
Just as any collector has an appreciation for rarer finds, the most dedicated plane spotters track and record special plane sightings by writing down or photographing their unique tail numbers. That’s why, this week, aviation enthusiasts have traveled to the TWA rooftop from as far as California, Germany, Bermuda, and even Kazakhstan: The United Nations General Assembly is gathering in New York City, bringing dozens of heads of state—and their special-edition aircraft—to land at JFK.
“It’s the Super Bowl of plane spotting,” says Rae Kaczmarek, a 21-year-old student from Colorado who is spending the semester interning for LA Flights. When I ask what planes they’ve seen today, many spotters rattle off aircraft model numbers from memory: To the layman, it sounds like an unintelligible string of alphabet soup. On top of today’s must-see lists are the German government’s aircraft, an Airbus A350, and the South Korean presidential plane, a Boeing 747 known as Code One, as well as Air Force One, the call sign for US Air Force aircraft carrying the US president.
Around 4 p.m., Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy will land at JFK in an Airbus A319 narrow-body airliner, and later in the evening US president Donald Trump will land in a much-larger Boeing VC-25 aircraft, soon to be replaced by a $400 million Boeing 747-8 luxury jetliner (controversially gifted to Trump by the Qatari government).
The two world leaders plan to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week to discuss Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations. But here all that matters is the make and model of their planes. “There’s no other drama. There’s no real-world stuff,” Kaczmarek says. “It’s just like, ‘Look at how cool this plane is!’ And everybody’s like, ‘Yeah! That’s awesome!’”
