This Amarkaner Life: Plane Speaking

“It’s madness, no doubt about that. But it's just a silly hobby. Some people collect plastic bags. There was one on the television half a year ago. He got 75,000 plastic bags in his cellar — 75,000 plastic bags. It's madness. But that's a hobby. Hobbies are madness.”

Hello and welcome to episode two of This Amarkaner Life — Archipelago’s all-new season of stories from and about the island of Amager in southern Copenhagen.

I’m your host, James Clasper, and for this episode, I’d like you to return your seatbacks and tray tables to their fully upright position because, well, we’re heading to arguably Amager’s best-known restaurant.

SERVER CALLING OUT ORDER AND GRILL HISSING

Welcome to Flyvergrillen — in many respects, a classic Danish grill bar.

Its menu includes anything and everything you can deep-fry, broil or smother in brown sauce.

SERVER CALLING OUT “BACON CHEESEBURGER”

I have to admit the food is pretty good — which you’d expect given that Flyvergrillen has been drawing crowds for more than 50 years.

But as good as they are, the hotdogs, beef burgers and meatballs aren’t its selling point.

You see, Flyvergrillen translates as the Airplane Grill.

GRILL SOUND FADES

And you’ll find it at Copenhagen’s airport.

But don’t go looking for it before your next flight.

Because Flyvergrillen isn’t so much at the airport — as right alongside it.

ROAR OF AIRPLANE TAKING OFF INCREASES

Indeed, the only thing separating its outdoor trestle tables and kids' playground from the runway is a barbed-wire fence and about 100 metres of tarmac.

AIRPLANE TAKES OFF

That’s the sound of Air Canada flight 829 departing for Toronto, eight minutes behind schedule.

I know this because, well, Flyvergrillen isn’t merely a restaurant.

It’s the unofficial clubhouse for what may well be Copenhagen’s most dedicated hobbyists.

“The number is right in front of the engine, below the windows.”

“That was an Irish registration number.”

That’s Frank — and Frank is “one of the planespotters that come here virtually every day”.

That’s right. 

Pretty much every day, Frank makes the 12-kilometre round trip from his home at the top of Amager to Copenhagen airport in the island’s south.

I have to admit, I’d known about Flyvergrillen for years and always figured it was somewhere people went primarily for a cheeseburger, with the planes being a kind of novel sideshow.

It never occurred to me that anyone would do it the other way round, much less regularly.

As it turns out, Frank doesn’t just visit Flyvergrillen to see the planes or to eat the food.

Rather he goes “if not for anything else, then to treat the cat.”

Indeed, curled up on Frank’s trestle table was a moggy named Missecat.

“That is a cat in Danish.”

Actually, it means “pussycat” and is a bit more of a double entendre than its English equivalent.

Either way, I’d say that Frank certainly has something of a soft spot for Missecat.

“We are very good friends. He's 17-and-a-half years old. He was born here as a wild animal. 17 and a half years and never gets inside. That is quite amazing.”

Missecat’s presence I could understand — but what I really wanted to know was how Frank got here, to a greasy spoon on the northern side of Scandinavia’s second-busiest airport, squinting at fuselage through a pair of binoculars and stopping every now and then to stroke a geriatric cat.

His story begins, as so many do, with a formative experience in his youth.

“As a small child, we collected — me and my brother, and thousands of young boys, especially boys — wrote down number plates from cars. And at that time you could see by the number where it was from in Denmark. You can't anymore. You could at that time. Thousands of young kids did that. And then one day I saw the numbers on the planes, and I asked my dad what that was. And he said, ‘well, they're similar to the car numbers’. And I said, ‘oh, I'll change, and I'll collect aircrafts’. ‘You do that’, he said. And I still do.”

Frank wouldn’t tell me his age, but if I had to guess I’d say he was in his 60s.

He says he started planespotting as a teenager after his family moved to a town just south of the airport in the late 1960s and he had countless opportunities to spot planes throughout his career — first as a mechanic at SAS, then as an engineer at rival airline Mærsk.

So, then. How many planes has he “collected”, so to speak?

“I don't know. 90,000 or something like that.”

OK, fasten your seatbelts. It’s time for the nerdy stuff.

Spotting or collecting a plane means identifying it by its airline registration number for the first time.

And you can find that number in several locations on a plane.

On the front of the landing gear.

Under the wing.

And on the rear of the fuselage or the tail.

If you’re looking to get started, that one’s relatively easy to spot with a pair of good binoculars.

And while some planespotters quote-unquote “collect” planes by photographing them, others simply cross them off their list.

Back to Frank.

I wanted to know how his day was going, so I asked him if he’d spotted any new planes yet.

“Yeah, I've got five or six already, and I'll get one more. That is a very good day.”

“How did you know they were gonna be here? You looked them up in advance, or you got lucky today?”

“I looked them up on the computer at home, and someone who was inside the airport tells me some of the bizjets that are coming.”

You heard that right.

Frank has an inside man at the airport who gives him the heads-up about any bizjets — meaning private jets used by business executives.

Which got me thinking — what is it that makes a plane worth knowing about and spotting?

“The first visit here, that's it.”

The first visit here. That’s it.

In other words, an interesting plane is a plane that has never landed in Copenhagen before.

And the day I met him, he said he had already seen five or six such planes — including: 

 “...two Swedish ones, they haven't flown here for about two years and they've got new planes, so we haven't seen them.”

And that’s when the penny dropped for me.

Because I think I’d always assumed that planespotters were just making notes of whichever planes were coming and going.

But not only is there a method in the madness, when you live in a city like Copenhagen, there’s an inherent limit to the kind of planes you get to see.

For one thing, you won’t spot any of the big planes used for long-haul flights to, say, Sydney. Gotta go to London or Paris to spot those.

And you’ll never see any of the smaller charter flights that whizz sunseekers from UK cities to resort towns like Malaga and Magaluf.

But every now and then, events conspire to provide spotters at Flyvergrillen with golden opportunities to see planes for the first time.

For instance, whenever Copenhagen hosts a major geopolitical summit, spotters get a rare glimpse of planes used by world leaders who seldom visit Europe much less tiny Denmark. 

For example, when Copenhagen hosted the COP15 climate summit, back in 2009, it provided Frank with his most satisfying spot ever.

“Hugo Chavez, private Airbus A319.”

That’s Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan president.

And he explained why it was so satisfying to see his private jet.

“It's been to Europe once. It flew nonstop from South America via Tenerife, was here for one or two days, I don't remember. And it left again. And it's never been to Europe again.”

That’s because the plane was deregistered after Chavez died in office in 2013.

“So the plane is gone. One chance in Europe to see it and that was here. They came from Britain. They came from Holland. They came from France and Germany to see that one.”

And I wanted to know what emotions Frank had felt. Joy? Pride? Satisfaction?

“Just a bit of happiness. ‘I got another one. Yeah. Great.’”

Of course, Chavez wasn’t the only world leader making a rare visit to Copenhagen that year.

“What about the Egyptian SU-treble G. Have you seen that?”

That’s Claus, a fellow planespotter, who until this point had been quietly watching the comings and goings on the runway.

“They have a VIP government 330 or 340? No, it’s a 340, sorry. SU-treble G Have you ever seen that?”

“I don't remember that.”

I feel like the answer is: no, Frank hasn’t seen it but doesn't want to admit it.

Claus hasn’t spotted the Egyptian government’s plane either.

Turns out it’s been something of a white whale for him.

“That is one on my wishlist, and we were promised the 340. It was supposed to carry the Egyptian minister up here, but I think it was cancelled. It never showed up anyway, and each time, many times I've gone to an airport, and they'll say, ‘Oh, it was here yesterday. It will come back next week’, where we are not even here anyway. If one showed up here, uh, we will go through hell and water.”

At this point, I felt like Claus was ready to join the conversation, so I asked him how long he’d been coming to Flyvergrillen to spot planes — and why.

“I mean, I’m a novice compared to him. I started in 2000. I had a friend living in the same building as I lived in and he had heard something about this place Flyvergrillen. And we went, and I think I saw Frank on that day, and then I think we asked him what he was doing and then he showed me. I always liked airplanes so that was a good way to satisfy my curiosity. Usually, I come here when I know something particular to point out is coming in and then I go back home, especially when it gets colder. We are not getting younger.”

I asked Claus how big the local planespotting community is.

“​​It’s shrinking because some die and some lose interest. Yeah, 10. Maybe, 12, 15. I don't know.”

Scarcely enough to fill Flyvergrillen’s indoor tables, then.

Speaking of which, I wanted to know what they thought of Amager’s most famous grill bar.

“It’s all right. We could spot from other places. Out on the coastline, there is a nice place to sit in a bus stop. But there is nothing there. You can't get a cup of water or the toilet or anything. And here you can get everything.”

Better than a bus stop. Faint praise indeed.

How about the food, though? 

“I eat quite different things here sometimes. Sometimes I don't eat anything but an ice cream. Even spotters need food occasionally. Occasionally. Even spotters.”

At this point, Missecat started coughing or sneezing or trying to throw up a hairball.

Nobody was quite sure what was happening, though Frank didn’t seem too concerned.

“His mum was a real wild cat. She had kittens out here three times. We had never could touch any of them but him. He's from the last one. He wanted himself, when he was about six, seven weeks, to get in contact with people. That happens occasionally. He spent about a month becoming very good friends with some of us. And then he was worse than Putin, he threw away his mom and his two sisters. This is his territory. Only his.”

Of course, there’s a question hanging over this episode like a 737 circling the city before landing. So when it was clear that Missecat was going to be just fine, I decided to address the elephant in the room. Or perhaps that should be on the runway.

“Can I ask you both a question that comes up whenever I mention this story to people, to friends — like, my friends laugh at it.”

“Yeah.

“Like, so like, do you understand…”

“They're not the only ones.”

“Oh no.”

“Do you get my point?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What is the point? What is the point of planespotting? It's a hobby. It's a hobby. Yes. The ultimate goal is to get as many aircraft seen as possible.”

“It’s madness, no doubt about that. But it's just a silly hobby. Some people collect plastic bags. There was one on the television half a year ago. He got 75,000 plastic bags in his cellar — 75,000 plastic bags. It's madness. But that's a hobby. Hobbies are madness.”

I think I know what Frank means.

Any hobby — especially if it involves collecting things — is a kind of obsession.

At the same time, having a hobby can be a way to stave off the madness, by providing a sense of control. There’s something about the ritualistic act of collecting things that can make us feel safe and secure. When things seem out of control, we often seek out routines or objects whose familiarity provides a source of comfort.

Still, I had a nit to pick. Because unlike, say, making model airplanes or flying a small plane for that matter, I couldn’t see how planespotting was a hobby that you could actually get better at.

Was it just about that ultimate goal of seeing as many aircraft as possible? Maybe.

But as Frank was quick to point out, there’s actually a right way of going about that. 

While some planespotters believe they need to see a plane’s registration number with their own eyes, less scrupulous spotters “collect” planes merely by seeing them in the sky and verifying their location and identity using websites like FlightRadar.

“I don't do that, but many of them do. They've seen it. Even at night, when they see something up there, just a red light — bing, bing, bing. ‘Oh, I've seen that plane.’ Rubbish in my world.”

In other words, while you can’t necessarily get better at planespotting, aside from improving your binocular skills or enduring cold weather for long stretches, you can choose to follow a more challenging moral code about what constitutes a proper “spot.”

And for the record, Claus is also on Team Frank.

“Many say, well, now they’ve seen it. And you cannot argue about it because he has seen it, but not in my point of view. And not in Frank’s too. We want to see it, you know, real.”

At that juncture, Claus left us to find a spot on the coast, where he could better view the arrival of a Portuguese plane he’d never spotted before.

And Frank fancied an ice cream, so we decided to go inside, and as we wandered over to the restaurant, I asked Frank if he had any family.

“No. No, I haven't, because I have been an alcoholic for 30 years. In two months. In two months' time, I haven't touched alcohol for 14 years. I finally got out of it. It's a bloody hell. I've just about killed myself three or four times with alcohol. I finally got out of it, and that's it.”

The conversation had taken an unexpectedly darker turn and just as I was about to ask Frank if he believed that planespotting provided him what a sense of stability, he looked at me and said:

“When the cat isn't here anymore, I'll disappear.”

And with that, he left me to go in search of his ice cream.

Which is when it occurred to me that the cat that Frank visits every day is his family and that looking after it — feeding it, petting it, talking to it  — is what gives him a sense of comfort and control.

Spotting planes? Well, in a way, that’s just something he does to pass the time while his beloved Missecat sleeps.

OUTRO MUSIC

You’ve been listening to episode two of This Amarkaner Life, a new season of Archipelago all about the island of Amager.

If you’ve enjoyed listening to it, feel free to share it with friends and family or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts.

The music used in this episode is by two artists: Scenery and Squares and Triangles.

You can find links to their music in the show notes, along with one to Flyvergrillen’s menu.

My name is James Clasper, many thanks for listening — I wish you a safe onward journey.