Once a month at least, Luka Cvetkovic heads down to the Old Swords Road, which runs alongside the main runway at Dublin Airport. He’s been doing this since he was a boy. Why? “I’ve been interested in planes since I was three or four,” Cvetkovic says. “We live fairly close to Dublin Airport, and my parents took me a few times to look at the planes. Then I got a book on planes as a present when I was five. It just went from there.”
From looking at planes flying in and out, and noting down their registration numbers, Cvetkovic developed a parallel passion for photography and started taking his own pictures (available via euro_spotter on Instagram) of aircraft landing and taking off at Dublin. He has never stopped. “It’s a million parts all working together, hanging 12,000m in the air,” he says. “It’s almost a miracle.”
Maybe it’s our island nation status or the renewed attention to flying that Covid brought, but aviation geekery – or AvGeekery as it’s known – is having something of a moment. Even if the days of airborne exotica such as Boeing 747s and Concorde landing at Dublin Airport are long gone, Irish bloggers, vloggers and YouTubers are enthusiastically delivering everything from aviation news to critiques and commentary on hard landings on home soil to their followers.
One of those influencers is Pete the Irish Pilot, aka Peter Hutchison, a former military and airline pilot who adds his voice and expert eye to videos of aeroplanes taking off, flying and landing for the benefit of his more than 200,000 followers online. Born and raised a stone’s throw from the airfield at Belfast harbour, which is now Belfast City Airport, Hutchison became obsessed with flying at an early age, but knew money would be an obstacle to him getting his hands on the stick and feet on the rudder pedals. “I didn’t have the money to become a pilot but I found ways around that,” he says. “I swept out hangers, I made cups of tea.”
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His first flying route was into the Royal Air Force, where he eventually flew and instructed others to fly the powerful Panavia Tornado ground-attack aircraft, although Hutchison’s time on RAF’s 13 Squadron was spent flying aircraft with their 20mm canon replaced with a high-tech video reconnaissance pod, which he used to help enforce the post-Gulf War no-fly zones over southern Iraq. After those experiences, he switched to commercial aviation.
These days Hutchison is known for regularly taking anonymous pilots to task on their landing techniques, criticising those who press on for bumpy landings when they ought to have “gone around” but equally praising those who slide on to the runway with what he calls “a buttery landing – the full Kerrygold”.
“I’m doing this, first and foremost, for a laugh,” says Hutchison over a video call from his “aviation shed” at his home in England. “It started as a laugh and I hope it maintains that because I don’t come with any sort of malice, nor [am I] putting myself on an ace-of-base pedestal.
“It was very rare, in my 42 years of flying, that I met a natural pilot. We’ve all got our limitations and the day you say you haven’t got any – well, it’s a day too late, that you’ve hung up your flying suit or closed your logbook.”
As with anything, Hutchison says, pilots can improve their technique. “After a while – like playing golf, or sailing, or snooker – you get better at it,” he says. He adds that it’s difficult for pilots to ensure smooth landings when conditions and circumstances differ so much, with pilots possibly negotiating landings at airports from New York to Johannesburg on any given week.
“If in doubt, do not press on,” is his advice. “Go around and fly as if you’ve got your wife and kids in the back.”
Hutchison has words of warning for airlines trying to save the pennies and stick to a too-tight schedule in all weathers and conditions. “On a normal, bright summer’s day where the weather is fine, that’s grand, but that schedule doesn’t change during the winter, when they’re flying into the most horrific conditions – which are legal, but you’ll have to taxi slower; there’ll be all sorts of restrictions on the ground,” he says.
“But still, that clock is ticking because on-time performance is what those in the office will be measuring. They don’t sit and say, ‘Well, tell me what the weather was like in Warsaw,’ or wherever else. So there is a lot of induced pressure from the companies, particularly in the low-cost sector.”
All of which, combined with Hutchison’s commentary over videos in which aircraft wobble, bounce and occasionally slam their way down on to the world’s runways, might make some people who are already nervous about flying even more concerned. However, Hutchison says his aim is to create the opposite effect.
“First and foremost, I’m sorry that they’re nervous about flying,” he says. “That just drives me more to get them into the air. Fear is generated by the instinctual part of the brain telling the thinking part a bunch of lies. It’s as if your brain told you that your kettle was an unexploded bomb – you wouldn’t go near the thing, even though intellectually you know it’s not true.
“If you can teach people that the sound they hear on start-up, or the noise made by a power transfer unit – which sounds like a barking dog at times – is nothing to worry about; or if you can reassure them that the aeroplane isn’t going to fall out of the sky because of turbulence, then you would go a long way down the road of sorting it out for them.”
Some nervous flyers, he says, have found his work very helpful. “I’ve had a few people, maybe half a dozen, that have said, ‘Well, that explains a lot. Thanks very much.’ That’s job done; that is marvellous. I hope that people see what I’m doing in the balance rather than just ‘he’s there for clickbait’ and trying to slag people off, because that would be incredibly disloyal to an industry that I’m kind of overdrawn on. So that’s why I’m trying to give a bit back.”
It’s clearly working, as Ireland seems to be copperfastening its place in the aviation world. In November Kerry-based financial services firm Fexco won the Irish Times Innovation award for its PACE software, which allows investors to track aviation emissions in real time, ensuring that the investment cash goes to airlines making the best efforts for the environment.
The next generation of Ireland’s AvGeeks is also being raised. Broadcaster and writer Maïa Dunphy has one in her house – her nine-year-old son Tom.
“Since sharing my son’s enthusiasm, a lot of people have shared their own fanaticism with me, and it’s such a joy,” says Dunphy. “I honestly don’t know if will be a career for him but equally I know it’s more than a passing fad. He knows his flaps from his ailerons – there’s a chat up line for when he’s older – and I have a picture he drew explaining the laws of flight – lift, weight, drag and thrust – that he drew when he was just seven.
“I had never heard of Bernoulli’s Principle [the part of physics that explains how a wing generates lift] until I was 45 years old; I still don’t actually understand it, but I have it for pub quizzes now.”
Soon, Tom will have a nicer platform from which to indulge his passion for planes. Right now, there’s only a slightly muddy lay-by and a grassy hump next to Dublin’s main runway from which to see the aircraft close up. That should change soon: the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) has applied for planning permission for a dedicated viewing platform with shelter from the weather, and even a coffee dock, to allow Ireland’s aviation geeks some proper viewing space for their hobby.
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“We’re not going down the same road as some of the airports in the UK and charging for access to viewing,” says DAA media manager Graeme McQueen. “We want to put in a free platform that will keep people warmer, and certainly drier, and give them something that’s a nice place to go and watch planes.”
Aviation is often a fraught subject – environmentally, especially – but Ireland seems to be building an engaged and harmonious community around the subject. Long may it last.
