Patrick Kuklinski stands on the edge. Dressed all in black, at least a baseball cap on his head against the sun, which is beating down quite heavily up here. He has comparatively manageable equipment: a camera, nothing else. No ladder, no parasol, no camping chair, no cool box with food, no interchangeable lenses like all the other cracks next door. On Saturday afternoon, around 100 plane spotters lay in wait on the south viewing hill at the airport, their large, heavy telephoto lenses always ready in case something exciting came flying in from the east.
For example, an Airbus A340-200, like that of the Egyptian government at the time. Or a Boeing 747SP in which the Sultan of Oman once sailed to the Erdinger Moos. None of these magnificent specimens are in sight right now, and yet the spotters all pull up their cameras at the same time, as if at the push of a button, and pull the trigger: clack-clack-clack-clack. If you ask what kind of plane it was that landed on the southern runway of Franz-Josef-Strauß Airport, Patrick Kuklinski just shrugs his shoulders: “I have no idea.” Short pause: “But I can check.” Speaks it, looks into the display and says: “A Kuwaiti.” Well then.
There are quite a few people for whom airplanes in the sky all look the same: big, white, far away. The vast majority of flyers are not interested in the type designation of their means of transport or its paintwork, but only that the plane does not crash and please do not hop around so much in the air.
Plane spotters are polarized differently. Some of them are interested in exotic airlines, others in flashy designs, and still others hunt down registration numbers, so to speak, the license plates of every airplane, until they have all the fliers of an airline.
If the world’s most important politicians believe that they have to meet for the G7 summit in Werdenfelser Land instead of on a cozy aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific, then it’s a nightmare for many police officers and taxpayers, but a feast for plane spotters. Patrick Kuklinski, who is only here for the third time on the hill, is hoping, like everyone else, for Air Force One and US President Joe Biden: “I’m not going home before then,” he says.
“When Obama was there, my pictures were already in a few newspapers”
But when are they coming, the two Air Force Ones? state secret. And that is so well guarded that even the SZ’s foreign policy department doesn’t know anything specific in advance. So just stand there and wait? Oh no! It’s still early afternoon when a squad of camera carriers packs up – although not a single G-7 Big Boss has landed yet! What do they know that everyone else doesn’t know? Well, obviously a lot: “Air Force One doesn’t come until half past eleven at night, Macron at 6:35 p.m. We’re going to eat ice cream in town,” says Patrick Leinweber, a firefighter from Penzberg, as you can see from his T-shirt can.
Unlike his colleague Kuklinski, he has quite a lot to lug around: ladder, parasol, camping chair, cool box, interchangeable lenses. professional stop. Of course he also wears a sun hat. He’s been there for nine years, started with a simple camera, but has now reached the five-figure range in terms of equipment. He photographed 4,800 different aircraft in Munich, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, London, Paris and Ramstein. In real life he is an electrician, but has registered a small business with the snap shop. “When Obama was there, my pictures were already in a few newspapers,” he says proudly. It was a quarter to seven in the morning, “but the heat was just as bad as this year”.
Leinweber is not traveling alone. Half a dozen buddies belong to the clique: Philipp Ebert from Lower Franconia and Christian Knobl from Herzogenaurach, for example. They have known each other for years and share a passion for ridicule, which was still recommended to mere mortals by the governments of the warring parties during the Second World War. And they share the information that goes beyond the data of the Flightradar24 online service. Because government planes like Air Force One are no longer to be found there, unlike when Barak Obama visited seven years ago. At the time, it only came earlier than reported because it had a tailwind.
Where the planespotters got their information from
But how do Leinweber & Co. know when Joe Biden will land? The man, who is so willing to share information, tightens his lips: “Well, over the years you get to know people who in turn know someone at the airport.” Colleague Knobl ends the printing process on the subject of informant protection and says: “It’s like a good mushroom forest: you don’t tell anyone about it.” He doesn’t have to. But what else does the source say? “Macron this evening at half past six, the Indian at five in the morning – it will be another short night,” says Leinweber, who has rented a room in Hallbergmoos with his friends until Tuesday. They’ve already eaten the first five-liter keg, now it’s time for ice cream, and in the evening we’re going to eat together, as always, not just anywhere, of course, but in the “Airbräu” between the two airport terminals.
US President Joe Biden is of secondary importance for the plane spotters as a motive.
(Photo: IMAGO/Andreas Hübner/IMAGO/Future Image)
A few steps further, the siblings Andrea and Andreas Ludwig have made themselves comfortable. They came all the way from the Nuremberg corner: “But apart from the two military training areas, there isn’t that much going on there,” says the elderly lady with the flat cap and the white Airbus T-shirt. She is one of the few female spotters here and has a soft spot for model airplanes: “I’ve been collecting models on a scale of 1:500 since 1999, I already have a thousand of them – it’s slowly becoming a space problem.” Her favorite airline is Emirates: “I’ve flown with them twice: it was great. And you can see a 380 from them here.”
But G 7 or the security conference are not mandatory dates for her, she looks at the flight radar sporadically: “The other day at eight in the morning I saw that a blue Emirates with a stewardess on it and the inscription ‘Part of magic’ lands in Munich – um I was there at 1 p.m. and caught her. That was my highlight of the year.” She puffs on the cigarette and says: “Everyone is crazy in their own way.” No contradiction anywhere.
Incidentally, Air Force One landed around eleven o’clock on Saturday evening – tailwind. A difficult time for the spotters because it was pitch black. After all: You should have seen the plane from India on Sunday morning: Sunrise was at 5.15 a.m.