Planespotting Qantas

With three generations of my family working as cabin crew, and having worked on the ground crew at three different airports (MCI, STL & BOS) and logging an irresponsible number of hours playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, I am something of an airport junkie.

DFWAirport has an area especially for plane spotters, Founder’s Plaza located to the north of the airport.  Most often the plaza is the best place to watch planes land, but not always.  Whether they land to the south or north depends on which way the wind is blowing.

There are a couple of other things to pay attention to at Founder’s Plaza.  You can see where flights are coming from by using the app Flight Aware.  Air Traffic Control (ATC for short) is piped in live at the plaza.  Those rapid-fire instructions aren’t going to mean very much (not to me either), but you do want to perk up your ears for the word, “heavy” that indicates a big jet.  You can look for the various kinds of planes http://arunrajagopal.com/2010/08/12/identify-airbus-from-boeing/ (landing gears and engines are the telling signs).  The most thrilling part of plane spotting is the when the international carriers land.  From 1:30 – 2:30 you can see KLM come in from Amsterdam, Qantas come in from Sydney and Lufthansa come in from Frankfurt.

Here are a couple of videos of Qantas landing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGD3ZhRdXCA&feature=g-upl

Here’s the good one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MFfg13sb2g&feature=g-upl