TOP TIPS Plane talking

1 Flight paths

Before you settle on a composition, watch the flight path of a few planes as this’ll give you an idea of where to angle the camera, and how wide to go with your focal length. We ended up using a 16-35mm lens set to 28mm for a wide field of view, with the sun at the corner of the frame.

2 Runway schedules

Runways can be over two miles long so some spots along the perimeter will see more action than others. What’s more, airports with more than one runway will often switch things around to balance out noise pollution so it’s worth checking the schedules on airport websites.

3 Wind direction

It’s safer for planes to take off facing into the wind, so if the wind direction changes then the planes will too. When we arrived, the planes were moving from west to east but the wind changed and they started taking off from east to west. Heathrow’s Twitter feed kept us up to date.