Collecting airports: keep a list of airports and spots you’ve visited

The first evening at your home airport, the trip to the big hub, the connection in Zurich where you stood at the glass for a moment: over time a surprising number of airports add up – and even more places you’ve shot from. If you don’t write it down, after a few years you no longer know whether you’ve been to an airport, which spot worked there and when the light was right. This guide shows you how to keep visited airports and spots as a collection: with clear counting rules, unique codes and spot notes that really help you on your next visit.

Collecting airports: the short answer

An airport collection consists of two linked lists. The airport list records where you’ve been – with code, country, date of first visit and type of visit. The spot list records which place you shot from there and under which conditions that works. Both are joined by a unique key, ideally the airport’s ICAO code.

That sets this collection apart from the other typical spotter lists. When collecting aircraft types the model counts, when collecting registrations the individual aircraft, and with the airline list the operator. The airport and spot list, by contrast, describes you: where you’ve been and which places you know. And it’s the only one of the four lists that directly helps you plan your next spotting day.

Step one: what counts as visited?

It sounds trivial, but it’s the question most airport lists later fail on. Have you “visited” Frankfurt if you only connected there? Does the airfield where you went to an airfield festival count? And what about the stopover where you stayed on the plane? If you don’t decide this beforehand, you end up mixing apples and oranges.

It has proven worthwhile to keep each type of visit in its own column or with its own abbreviation. Then you only decide at analysis time what goes into your main number.

Type of visit	Typical code	Usually counts as visited?	Note
Spotting on site	S	yes	the core of every spotter collection
Departure or arrival as a passenger	F	yes	a real visit even without a photo
Connection in the terminal	C	a matter of opinion	mark separately, often just a view through the window
Stopover without deplaning	T	rather no	honestly keep it as a special case
Airfield festival, airshow, museum at the field	E	a matter of opinion	a separate category keeps the main list clean
Overflight	–	no	belongs at most in a travel logbook

In the end, many spotters keep two numbers: “spotted” and “visited in total”. The first is the honest spotter tally, the second the travel tally. Both are legitimate – the only important thing is that you don’t mix them.

Step two: unique codes as the backbone

Airport names are unsuitable as keys. They change, exist in several languages and are sometimes ambiguous when a city has several airports. Standardized codes are better. There are two systems:

• IATA codes consist of three letters and are assigned by the airline association IATA. You know them from tickets and baggage tags. They have no geographic structure and are usually derived from the name of the airport or the city. IATA also assigns codes for whole metropolitan areas with several airports and even for some train stations.
• ICAO codes consist of four letters and are maintained in the ICAO publication Doc 7910 (Location Indicators). The first one or two letters stand for region and country, the rest for the specific airfield.

Airport	IATA	ICAO	What the ICAO code tells you
Munich	MUC	EDDM	ED = Germany, civil airfield
Frankfurt	FRA	EDDF	ED = Germany, civil airfield
Hamburg	HAM	EDDH	ED = Germany, civil airfield
Zurich	ZRH	LSZH	LS = Switzerland
Vienna	VIE	LOWW	LO = Austria
Amsterdam Schiphol	AMS	EHAM	EH = Netherlands

A lot speaks for ICAO codes in a collection. They are structured, so you can sort your list by country using the prefix alone. In Germany, civil airfields begin with ED and military ones with ET – handy if you want to count military airfields separately. And ICAO codes also exist for many small airfields that have no IATA code at all. If you’re out at regional airports or small airfields more often, you quickly hit limits with IATA codes alone.

You can still keep the IATA code too – it’s what you read on the boarding pass and helps when matching old travel documents. How both systems work in detail is explained in the guide IATA and ICAO codes explained.

Where to get master data

You don’t have to type coordinates, codes and country names by hand. A widely used free dataset comes from OurAirports: the project provides CSV files with airports, runways, radio frequencies and countries, which by its own account it updates nightly and publishes in the public domain – though without any guarantee of accuracy. For a spreadsheet collection you can filter out the airports of your region and use them as a target list. Runway data from the same dataset helps later with the spot notes.

Step three: set up the airport list

A few columns are enough for the airport list. More fields make entering data tedious without adding much.

Whether you keep it on paper, in a spreadsheet or in an app is secondary – what matters is that the fields are filled in consistently. A ready-made structure for spreadsheets is described in the article on the spotting logbook in Excel or Google Sheets. Which variant suits your daily life is compared in Logbook: paper or digital.

Step four: document spots

This is where the real value of the collection lies. An airport isn’t a single place: at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, for example, there are several spotter points at different runways, including the Spotterplaats at the Polderbaan, the Spotterplaats at the Kaagbaan and the Panoramaterras. Which of them works depends on the day. That’s why every spot gets its own entry, linked to its airport via the ICAO code.

Field	Example content	What you need it for
Name and airport	Visitors’ hill, EDDM	unambiguous assignment
Coordinates	latitude and longitude of the vantage point	navigation, map, sun position
Runway side and viewing direction	south of the north runway, looking north	light planning
Runway direction in use	for which direction (08 or 26) the best subjects come	does the spot work today?
Light window	looking north: sun behind you during the day	right time of day
Subjects	landings, taxiing traffic, takeoffs	what you can expect there
Access and facilities	parking, public transit, fence height, restrooms	practical travel
Own rating	1 to 5 points plus a short sentence	comparison with other spots

The runway side, light window and runway direction in use columns are especially worthwhile. How to derive the light direction from the runway number is explained in Planning the sun position. Why a spot stays empty on some days because the wind sends the aircraft to the other runway is covered in Understanding the runway direction in use at an airport.

Coordinates straight from the photo

If your camera or smartphone saves the location, you already have the coordinates of every spot. If that feature is missing, the images can be linked to a GPS track afterward. How that works and what to watch out for when sharing is shown in the guide Geotagging aircraft photos. With the coordinates you can then show spots and sightings on a map – tools for that are compared in Visualizing sightings and spots on a map.

The target list: in rings instead of all at once

Without a target list you know where you’ve been, but not where you still want to go. A list of all the airports in the world doesn’t help much – it contains tens of thousands of fields, most of which are uninteresting or unreachable for spotters. A build-up in rings is more sensible, similar to the type list:

• Home region: All commercial airports and interesting airfields you can reach and return from in one day. Most spot notes are created here, because you come back often.
• Germany and neighboring countries: The big hubs and the well-known spotter airports. A selection is provided by the best spotting spots in Germany, such as the Munich Airport visitors’ hill (Besucherhügel) or the Affenfelsen in Hamburg.
• European classics: Destinations for short trips and long weekends. Inspiration comes from the best spotting spots in Europe – from the Butzenbüel in Zurich to the spotter places at Schiphol.
• Wish list: The faraway destinations for which you plan a trip of their own. This is where the places that make your collection special go.

For rings two to four, good preparation pays off. What you should clarify before a spotting trip is summed up in the article Planning a spotting trip.

What the collection tells you

A cleanly kept airport and spot list can be analyzed like any other logbook. Typical questions it answers:

• How many new airports are added per year? A good indicator of how much you’re out and about – and whether you spot more in breadth or in depth.
• Which countries are missing? The ICAO prefix shows you right away which regions are underrepresented in your collection.
• Which spots deliver the most sightings? If you link your sightings to the spot, you see where time at the fence pays off most.
• Which spots have you visited only once? Often these are exactly the places you’d need to return to in better weather or with a different runway direction in use.

You’ll find more analysis ideas in the guide Analyzing your own spotting statistics.

Breadth or depth: which type of collector are you?

Airport collectors can roughly be split into two camps. Some want to tick off as many different airports as possible. Others know a few airports inside out – every spot, every runway direction in use, every light window. Both work, but they call for different documentation.

If you collect in depth, you benefit most from detailed spot lists: after one season you know where to go for your home airport for every combination of wind and time of year. If you collect in breadth, you should at least record the basic data for each spot – years later, on your next visit, that’s worth its weight in gold.

Common mistakes in an airport collection

• Mixing types of visit. If you lump connections, spotting and stopovers into one number, you can no longer analyze the list cleanly later.
• Noting only airport names. Without a code you get duplicates as soon as an airport is renamed or shows up in another language.
• Forgetting the spot. “Spotted in Frankfurt” hardly helps you on your next visit. Only the specific vantage point with light and runway direction in use makes the note useful.
• Reconstructing old visits from memory. If the date is uncertain, mark it as estimated. Old photos with timestamps or travel documents help with filling in the gaps.
• Not noting access rules. Spots change: fences get raised, parking lots closed, paths rerouted. Note the date of your last check – and always stay on publicly accessible areas. What is allowed is summed up in Is plane spotting allowed?
• Mixing museums into the airport list. Aviation museums deserve a collection of their own. An overview is offered by Aviation museums in Germany.

Conclusion

An airport collection is quickly set up, but only becomes truly valuable with two ingredients: clear rules for what counts as a visit, and spot notes that go beyond a bare place name. ICAO codes give you a unique key that delivers country analyses almost by itself and also covers small airfields. Together with your type, registration and airline lists, this gives a fairly complete picture of your spotter career. How to cleanly record all the sightings behind it is shown in the guide Logging sightings.