O’HareAviation Plane Spotting – 5 Years on YouTube, A Celebration of Flight

April 9, 2017 flight2000it

O’HareAviation Plane Spotting – 5 Years on YouTube, A Celebration of FlightOn April 3, 2012, this day five years ago, the O’HareAviation YouTube channel was created.

To all who come to this happy place… Welcome!

I’ve been in love with aviation ever since I was a young boy and through the years it has always been a constant wish of mine to spend as much time as possible either flying or at the airport with the airplanes I love. If I couldn’t, I would read everything I could get my hands on aviation-related, collect aviation models, print out airliner pictures, listen to aviation radio, devote hours to watching them as they flew over my neighborhood, etc. Aviation has always been there for me to give me direction and purpose in life as much as anything of this world really can.

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, O’Hare International Airport, the world’s busiest airport for much of that time, was the airport I called my own. Even though I was not always able to be as close as I wanted since my family lived quite far from the airport, I was still always proud to tell people that O’Hare was my airport.

With the advent of YouTube and other such sites, the ability to watch airplanes and “be at the airport” whenever I wanted suddenly became a reality like never before. Even though I had experimented with making my own aviation videos in past, and had been encouraged by my friends to try my hand at it at O’Hare, I never took it too seriously.

Fast forward to 2012. Being in college didn’t always allow me the opportunity to go planespotting like I wanted, so it was common of me to spend my free time on YouTube enjoying aviation videos now being uploaded on a daily basis. Even so, I was disappointed by the lack of uploads of videos from my beloved O’Hare.

So it was that I journeyed to an abandoned parking lot on the west side of O’Hare with a random camcorder with the hope that when the day was over I would have enough videos that I would be able to enjoy a taste of the experience I so loved whenever I wanted, not just on days I had free time.

It was the start of something new for me and I needed a brand new Chicago themed YouTube channel where the passion for Chicago-specific aviation was celebrated. “O’HareAviation” seemed explanatory enough and the name wasn’t taken yet. So it would be.

With videography I found a creative outlet that paired well with my longtime hobby.

I thankfully stuck with it, putting in hundreds of hours, filming hundreds of airplanes, wearing out another camera I later bought that eventually gave out under the abuse of 11-14 hour weekend days.

My first video attempt didn’t use a tripod and I’ve never used one ever since, instead devoting hours of practice to filming with two hands only in order to allow for increased flexibility to adapt to the challenging and complicated O’Hare planespotting environment filled with private property, skill shots, runway changes, and a complex runway layout that makes chasing down that airplane you want quite a chase indeed. Recently, the O’Hare airport diagram has changed to make it somewhat easier, but speed still wins and numerous times I have been able to pull a shot off that any other way would not be possible.

As the months turned to years, I finished college and have moved on to a career in the aviation industry. The theme has been expanded to include not just aviation at O’Hare but travel, aviation and airplanes everywhere in general. Even so, the name still stays, a tribute to the airport where it all started.

While this venture still has a long way to go before the mission is truly accomplished, I think that this channel has fulfilled, in some way, a small part of what I set out to do with it.

Who knows what it is in store for the years to come, but reflecting upon what the channel has become I would hope for more of the same …Just even better and from more airports.

There is no way that I could ever begin to appropriately thank all the thousands of people around the world for their support of this channel. What I thought would be a simple few trips to a favorite airplane watching location has grown and enhanced a lifelong passion of mine and spurred me on to a career doing what I love. I am endlessly grateful. It’s been quite the joyride so far, and the saying is true, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it’.

To all of the 24+ thousand subscribers and viewers of this channel everywhere that have enjoyed my aviation videos I say a big “THNXamuchalotimus for watching!”

– Jay

Cameras used:
Sony HX200v and HX300
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