Bernie Leighton leans out
an open- sided helicopter into a chilly breeze, Nikon camera glued to
his face as he focuses on his unsuspecting photographic quarry.
The celebrity in his lens
is no Kardashian. It’s Etihad Airways’ first 787 Dreamliner, parked
outside Boeing Co.’s wide- body jet plant north of Seattle and an object
of desire among planespotters for a new, secrecy-shrouded paint scheme.
Leighton is angling for
Internet fame as he stalks the 787, already one of the most-chronicled
industrial products on the planet for its futuristic design and troubled
start. Selling the first aerial shot of the shimmering silver-and-gold
Etihad plane would also cover the cost of his $500 copter ride.
“I’d say there’s monetary
reward, but not really,” the 27-year-old Leighton said beforehand,
facing the hulking factory and an adjacent airfield crammed with new
Boeings. “It’s mostly about pride, about keeping my streak going.”
In 4 1/2 years of
professional planespotting, Leighton has snapped more than 35,000 photos
and garnered at least 7 million Internet views. He’s among the growing
ranks of “avgeeks” who gather and share images of aircraft with the zeal
displayed by enthusiasts pursuing rare comic books, baseball cards and
other collectibles.
Their ardour creates
opportunities as well as challenges for Boeing. The constant
surveillance means that the world’s largest planemaker must play
hide-and-seek to keep commercial projects under wraps. Photos also
sometimes signal factory woes, as when a buildup of undelivered jets
preceded the disclosure of hairline wing cracks on some 787s in March.
If Airbus Group NV wants
to see the latest from its U.S. rival, it can rely on the stalkers
around Boeing’s plant and Paine Field near Everett, Washington. They
sometimes climb trees or fences to eyeball newly assembled aircraft
under tow to the paint shop to receive their livery, as an airline’s
markings are known. In 2011, Chicago-based Boeing swathed the first
747-8 Intercontinental jumbo jet in paper to thwart peeping eyes before
the unveiling of the red-and-orange “sunrise” design.
“When your factory, paint
hangars and delivery center sit directly adjacent to a public airport,
keeping a customer’s livery a surprise is next to impossible,” said Doug
Alder, a spokesman. “That’s why we coordinate with our customers to
make sure events tied to a new or special livery are done when the
airplane rolls out of the paint hangar.”
Those documenting
Boeing’s factory output are a subset of enthusiasts, almost always male,
compelled to meticulously track heavy machinery from locomotives to
steel mills, said George Hamlin, a former executive with Toulouse,
France-based Airbus who is now an aviation consultant.
Each watershed aircraft
draws more to the hobby, said Hamlin, who is based in Fairfax, Virginia.
He was captivated by the technology leap embodied in Boeing’s
humpbacked 747 jumbo in the late 1960s. “I started taking pictures
around that time period,” he said in a phone interview. “There were few
if any spotters or photographers.”
Over the decades Hamlin
has amassed more than 20,000 slides of aircraft, another 8,000 or so
digital shots and watched the ranks of jet enthusiasts swell with the
advent of the Internet.
Boeing’s Future of Flight
Aviation Center near the Everett plant is a magnet for this group,
drawing about 270,000 visitors a year. Shutterbugs flock to an
observation deck overlooking a Paine Field runway where Boeing test
pilots put wide-bodies through their paces.
Online tickets sold out
in three minutes for this year’s Aviation Geek Fest, according to museum
Marketing Director Sandy Ward. It’s an annual gathering that includes a
chance to wander the Everett factory, the world’s largest building by
volume.
“We’ll have people
sitting around the world — it might be midnight in Shanghai — hitting
refresh, refresh,” she said. “You’ll have virtual fistfights breaking
out.”
Boeing’s involvement
reflects a shift in its marketing, from ignoring avgeeks to inviting
bloggers to aircraft unveilings and events once reserved for
credentialed reporters.
“Aviation Geek Fest is an
opportunity for Boeing to embrace people with a passion for airplanes,”
said Alder, the spokesman. “Events like these connect us with an
enthusiastic audience for our products in ways that wouldn’t have been
possible a few years ago.”
For planespotters, the
Dreamliner continues to inspire a photo-fascination so intense that
die-hards vied for snapshots of the scarlet engine nacelles — the casing
visible under the wing — on a Virgin Atlantic 787.
The attention is “an
accidental Boeing creation,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst
at Fairfax, Virginia- based consultant Teal Group.
Boeing’s first all-new
aircraft of the 21st century fired imaginations with its
plastic-composite hull, then grabbed headlines as supply-chain snarls
delayed the initial delivery by three years to 2011. It was the first
jet whose development played out on Twitter, and became a focus of posts
by amateur blogger Jon Ostrower, who is now a Wall Street Journal
reporter.
Many of those who tuned
in for the early Dreamliner drama have stuck around, said David Parker
Brown, who founded AirlineReporter.com in 2008. He was inspired by
Ostrower’s social-media success, as was Uresh Sheth, a Wall Street
banker who pens the AllThings787 blog.
In his spare time, Sheth
compiles tables tracking the progress of every 787 assembled and
delivered. Sheth relies on tidbits shared by “volunteers,” not leaked
internal Boeing documents. He cross-checks each data point, often by
looking up photos from Dreamliner followers at Boeing’s factories in
Washington and South Carolina.
“It’s a labour of love,”
Sheth said in a phone interview. “I’d like to keep this information as
current as possible for as long as possible, until they stop building
it. It would be a nice resource for people.”
It’s no easy task. Through Nov. 5, Boeing had handed over 204 Dreamliners — and had a backlog of 850 more.
Leighton’s yen for
aviation started when he was an infant, living under an approach path to
an airport in St. John’s International Airport, in Newfoundland. His
mother would sometimes drive past the field to lull him to sleep.
At 18, Leighton began
haunting the forums on Airliners.net and gradually gaining the nerve to
post his own photos. Now he’s motivated by the friendly rivalry to land
“the first of anything,” from shots of a new model to a new livery, he
said. His specialty: snapping the first aerial perspective of these
jets, especially Dreamliners.
Leighton is most obsessed
with Soviet-era military aircraft, traveling to North Korea and
Kazakhstan to ride on aging transports. When he’s home in the Seattle
suburb of Redmond, Leighton regularly drives 32 kilometres in his Tesla
Model S to ogle planes at the “Lazy B,” as he calls the Everett plant.
A day job with flexible
hours — he declines to name his profession — pays for constant travel
and tools of the trade that include “a small car’s worth” of
photographic gear.
Using Sheth’s production
charts, Leighton monitored the Etihad 787’s progress through the factory
over the summer months. His interest grew as word leaked that the jet
would feature an edgier look that’s part of a branding makeover for the
Abu Dhabi-based airline.
Etihad got wind of the
stir over its new livery and hosted a special nighttime unveiling in a
live Webcast. That still left a photographic “first,” an overhead shot,
to be claimed by Leighton.
That’s how he found
himself in a four-seat Robinson R44 helicopter clattering to the Boeing
plant on the first sunny day after the late-September Etihad fete. As
pilot Daiichi Takeuchi slowed and backed into place about 300 metres
overhead, Leighton steadied his camera and went to work.
He was done 35 seconds
later. His photo of the jet’s abstract desert-themed paint job has been
viewed more than 36,000 times on Airliners.net while drawing more than
5,400 “likes” in postings on AirlineReporter and Etihad’s Facebook page.
“No one breaks even,” Leighton said. “We do this regardless.”
- Source: http://o.canada.com
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