Plane Spotting At Heathrow

Sometimes you have the desire to get out with the camera but struggle with ideas about what to photograph. Recently on such an occasion I decided to visit Heathrow Airport to take photographs of some of the planes. With something landing every couple of minutes I’d have plenty of images to edit in a short space of time.

One of the best places to photographs planes landing at Heathrow airport is the end of Myrtle Avenue near Hatton Cross when they are using the 27L runway for landing. Most days this runway is used at least part of the day. From 6am until 3pm they use one runway and then switch to another from 3pm until the last flight. The runways used alternate every week but you can download a free PDF with the schedule. For my first visit on July 3rd they would be using runway 27L to land from 3pm. I would visit Heathrow twice in July and this article will feature a small selection of the images I took on these two visits.

Plane Spotting In My Youth

I was actually a keen plane spotter in my youth after a school friend called Jonathon got me into the hobby. Back then I would have a copy of both Civil Aircraft Markings and Military Aircraft Markings to keep a log of the plane registrations. These two visits to Heathrow in July actually prompted me to buy a copy of Civil Aircraft Markings 2025. When you revisit a hobby many years later you are often struck by how much has changed. Some of these changes included:

• The aircraft type have changed as you would expect. When I started plane spotting in the 80’s you would see Concordes, Tridents, BAC1-11’s, Boeing 747 (Jumbo’s), DC-10’s, Tristars etc. Now the market is dominated by Airbus and Boeing but I was struck at how there seemed to be less variety in the shape and appearance of the planes. I did note a new (to me) manufacturer called Embraer, a Brazilian company).
• Many of the airlines I remember from my youth no longer exist. Pan Am and TWA are no more. The Greek registered planes were Aegean whereas back in the 80’s they would have been Olympic. There are also far more Chinese airlines flying to the UK than I remember. Back in the 1980’s you had the state airline CAAC with the red communist flag emblem. The Hong Kong based airline Cathay Pacific remains much the same, even the livery is how I remember it.
• The locations where plane spotters gather to watch planes at Heathrow has also changed. The Queen’s Building doesn’t exist and I don’t think plane spotters are tolerated on the top floor of car parks these days. For an updated guide on the best locations to watch planes at Heathrow Airport I would recommend the SpotterGuide website.

Plane Spotting Heathrow Gallery

The following is just a small sample of the images taken during my 2 visits to Heathrow in July 2024. To see more examples you can visit the two Facebook albums, links below:

Heathrow Plane Spotting Gallery 1

Heathrow Plane Spotting Gallery 2

Plane Spotting Heathrow -Lenses Used

Many people who regularly photograph planes would no doubt recommend that you use a telephoto zoom lens. Something like a 70-200 zoom would be good for photographing planes from Myrtle Avenue that are landing on runway 27L. However since I have 2 camera bodies I was able to use prime lenses for this viewpoint. For smaller planes like Boeing 737 and smaller Airbus aircraft I found my 135mm prime lens to be perfect. For larger planes like Airbus A380 I found my 50mm or 85mm lens worked best. Longer zooms will certainly be better suited to another viewpoints at Heathrow or indeed at other airports.

Going forward I hope to visit Heathrow a few more times, as well as visit some other UK airports. It would be good to photograph the increasingly rare Boeing 747 (Korean Air fly into Heathrow and some cargo airlines fly 747’s into East Midlands Airport). I’m also attracted by custom paint liveries and retro liveries that appear on some planes (including the BEA retro livery you can see in the gallery above).