I was going to title this post “The Spotting Fraternity”, but it was pointed out that the title was a bit misogynistic. Not intentionally, just through force of habit. Although over the years I have met some Lady Spotters, they are still pretty thin on the ground.
So what is the spotting community about in this day and age, to me it is just about people enjoying the hobby. If you are a spotter, you’ll understand better than most how much pleasure it can bring. When I was much younger we would go on spotting trips, hire a car or a minibus and head off – sometimes covering 8 or 10 airfields in a day.
Well with the number of bases and airfields around the country, you’d be hard pushed to do that today. We still do trips, not as often as we would like – but there is a much more social aspect to them now.
With age comes a certain perspective, there is much more taking time to enjoy the hobby and much less frenetic chasing numbers. A great deal less of the headless chicken dance, when you see something and cant read off the serial. But more important than all the above, taking time to talk to other spotters – something that happened a lot less in the past.
In general spotters are gregarious, we have a common interest after all. We all tend to frequent the same places, so tend to see the same faces there and are for the most part inclined to help each other out with information. I say for the most part, as with any group of people they come from all parts of the spectrum and some can be pigeonholed in the Secret Squirrel compartment.
But in the main spotters tend to be a pretty amenable bunch of people, yet we seem to be a dying breed – or maybe we are becoming more stratified. The sight of a spotter at the airfield perimeter with binoculars or a telescope, with someone standing beside them making notes in a notebook seems to be becoming rarer. There seem to be more photographers and older spotters, whereas the groups of school aged spotters seem to have vanished completely.
I sometimes wonder if it is just my skewed perception of things, or do the younger spotters do things in a different fashion – I wonder about the demographic of the community, particularly the age demographic.
I don’t really remember the last time that I saw a teenage spotter, regardless of what gender they have picked for themselves. So is our community aging, or going to go extinct. Or am I missing the mark here and the younger spotters are there and I’m not seeing them, as youngsters we used to hang around the perimeter somewhere or if there was a spectators terrace we’d be there or in the cafe.
As an older spotter, I am aware of how much damage the terrible events of 9/11 did to the hobby. I remember at the time discussing the implications for spotting, many of the possibilities we discussed at the time did in fact come to fruition.
And in truth I wonder if these events will in the end do for the community, it actually doesn’t matter what the makeup of the community is – with the exception of age. If there are no younger spotters, then pretty soon there will only be old spotters – and all too soon after that there may be no spotters.
Spotting club memberships seem to be down, maybe by as much as 25% – but the social media groups have memberships in the hundreds and in many cases in the thousands. So maybe the spotting community is evolving, there are hundreds of groups on facebook – some with thousands of members. So maybe the future of the community is in the digital realm, or even in the “metaverse” it might be that the community has already made the jump and only the dinasaurs like me are unaware of the fact – we are just sitting here waiting for our asteroid impact.