London Heathrow
“Big Jet TV”: Airplane fan becomes a YouTube star due to the hurricane
The almost eight-hour live stream “Storm Eunice at London Heathrow Airport” proved to be a YouTube hit
© Screenshot Youtube
When a low storm sweeps across England and challenges pilots landing at Heathrow, Jerry Dyer is in top form: the plane spotter stands next to the runway with his video camera, filming and commenting live on the jets dancing in the wind.
Britain has a new YouTube star. Jerry Dyer had his media breakthrough on Friday. For a good six years he has been reporting on his YouTube channel “Big Jet TV” about what is happening on the airfield of Europe’s largest airport, Heathrow Airport in west London.
Until now, he was only known to a small fan community of aircraft enthusiasts. But the storm “Eunice” – known in Germany under the name “Zeynep” – gave him a tailwind in the truest sense of the word. His video was viewed more than 6.6 million times; up to 200,000 people watched his live stream at the same time.
While most Britons followed the request not to leave their homes in Greater London because of the hurricane with wind speeds of up to 130 kilometers per hour, Dyer, on the other hand, was driven outside to his stand: on the roof of his van at the end of runway 27L where he positioned the tripod for his video camera. He reported live under the title for a period of almost eight hours “Storm Eunice at London Heathrow Airport”. The number of subscribers to his YouTube channel jumped to 250,000.
Jerry Dyer comments: “Go around” or “nicely done”
Dyer’s favorite is the go-around maneuver, a routine procedure that pilots regularly practice in the simulator. If the crews don’t touch down their planes in time with both main landing gears and sudden gusts allow the wingtips to touch the ground, they apply thrust and make a circuit to try again. “It’s the best you can get,” he told a BBC reporter. On Friday, airliners made up to three approach attempts before touching down or flying to another airport.
In an empty jumbo jet across the Atlantic
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Dyer always provides the maneuvers of the pilots with enthusiastic comments. “Nicely done” he exclaimed with relief on Friday when all landing gears of an Emirates Airbus A380 touched the ground and the wind noise as well as the reverse thrust from the engines could be heard. It was just great in these adverse weather conditions “that you can see the skills of the pilots and how they manage to deal with it,” he told the BBC.
Dyer reports up to twice a week from Heathrow, which has long since founded a club for whose members he reports exclusively from other locations when travelling. In the comments, his heart clearly beats for large aircraft such as the Boeing 777, which he calls “big old bully boy tripe-7” or for the increasingly rare jumbo jet.
The man with the oversized hat found his calling early on. He grew up listening to plane noise near Heathrow. When his nephew told him in 2015 that singer Bruce Dickinson of the band Iron Maiden was the pilot in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 that was about to land at Heathrow as part of a world tour, it was all over him.
The Boeing 747 chartered for the world tour, with lead singer Bruce Dickinson at the controls, also landed at London Heathrow in 2015
© Imago Images
He went to the airport, positioned himself next to the fence and broadcast the landing live on Twitter. The reactions and the success inspired him to further episodes. But it wasn’t until the hurricane on Friday that the plane nerd made it not only into the plane spotter forums, but also onto the websites of major media outlets such as the New York Times.
source: “Big Jet TV”
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