Day and night they’re out there, looking up at the sky along a narrow Sunset Road turnout next to McCarran International Airport. They’re plane-spotters, people who follow the hundreds of jet planes that land and take off daily from the airport’s tarmac, the sixth-busiest in the nation.
Some sit in their cars for hours on end. Some man cameras with huge telephoto lenses, snapping frame after frame of aircraft in transit. Some herd their kids around the asphalt lot while pointing at the jets aloft. Some read the interpretive signs and maps placed just beyond a chain-link fence along the verboten McCarran airstrip.
For some it’s an economic matter. Plane-spotting at McCarran is a cheap—make that downright cost-free—activity in Vegas, a town where money evaporates quickly for tourists and locals alike.
On a Saturday afternoon, Brian Dresser of Tucson, Arizona, watches the planes come in. “It’s fun. It gives you something to do. You don’t have to pay. When I’m in Vegas, I’ll come out here. I could stay here all day.”
Dresser adds the Sunset Road strip is a growing rarity among airports in these tense times. “Very few airports actually have a dedicated viewing area anymore, especially post-September 11.”
For keeping costs low and spending abundant surplus time, plane-spotting at McCarran is perfect for members of the post-work cadre, such as retired Army career man Mark Kirsch.
“I come out every day, just to relax,” says Kirsch. He estimates he spends about an hour on daily plane-spotting visits. And true to Kirsch’s words, I see his white truck with a distinctive “I’m proud to be from Nebraska” logo on three successive visits to the viewing area.
Jim Cameron, a 25-year Vegas resident, has pulled into the viewing area for nostalgic reasons.
“I used to come out here regularly. My wife just moved out here from Indiana. I decided to show her how we used to come out and watch the planes,” says Cameron, who feels physically connected to McCarran—he worked construction on the facility.
“When I was out here 25 years ago, we were building the airport,” Cameron says. “I was on the runway jack-hammering 24 inches of concrete in the summer 115-degree heat saying, ‘What am I doing here?’”
Cameron’s wife, Pam, may be at her first McCarran event, but she’s not new to the plane-spotting experience. Her father was a pilot, and she watched jets take off as a Midwestern kid. An aviation-friendly couple, the two were even married two years ago in a helicopter that took off from McCarran.
But it’s Jim who laughingly and preemptively answers the unasked question that must pop into the minds of many who see the oftentimes fogged windows of the cars in McCarran’s plane-watching lot.
“I used to come out here and have sex with my girlfriend.”
Photograph by Greg Thilmont