Picture of Aircraft Holding

[zoink]

Has anybody got a picture of a holding pattern from the bottom looking up?

I've always wondered if it was possible to take a picture of 6-8 aircraft in the spiral above your head!!

Thanks
z..

[Rainboe]

The holding patterns tend to be straight lines for about a minute (well mine are straight lines like trouser creases!) which means about 4 miles straight, then about 1 1/2 minutes in a turn to come the other way and another turn, which means about 20 track miles altogether in a hold. You are viewing the lowest aeroplane probably at 7000' up to 14,000', or 1 mile or so up to 2 1/2 miles. You aren't going to see a lot of aeroplanes in a close column in the sky! They will be spread all over.

[zoink]

thanks!!
:)

[Spitoon]

I tell you, a hold doesn't look like that on radar! And I guess I can't ever have put Rainboe in the hold 'cos I don't think I've seen any aircraft do the stright bits like trouser creases - even the ones that are computer assisted wobble a bit.

[treadigraph]

I live a few miles west of the Biggin hold and on sunny days get a lovely view of the western end of the racetrack - perhaps seven or eight in it at a time on occasion... Whilst one sometimes sees three or four aircraft which appear to be in roughly the same section of the hold (plenty of vertical separation of course!), I doubt you'd ever get a meaningful photo of all of them together - certainly not with my camera!

[Rainboe]

Spitoon, you'd know me if you saw my holds.....like Gillette razor blades they are. The FMS helks just a leetle beet.

[Irish Steve]

back in the days before 9-11 when it was possible to get on to jump seats, I can remember going round the bovingdon hold one morning, and looking out of the eyebrow window as we went round the corner, so effectively looking up, and there were 4 other aircraft directly above us all doing the same thing.

Looked mighty impressive at the time, just a pity I didn't have a suitable camera to hand:E

[Swedish Steve]

Just to show my age, when I was at school in 1962 we had the Epsom beacon in our playing fields. In the mornings at 0830 in the summer we could look up and see (as I remember now) eight aircraft going round in the hold. I wonder if it was just one day, or was it regular to have to hold for LHR in those days?

[magbreak]

I remember seeing a photo of an aircraft's holding pattern in one of the flying magizines a few years ago. The contrails had stayed at the various hold levels and all the descents. Looked very good.

[seacue]

Thread drift warning.
Is this holding thing primarily a European thing these days? It was fairly common decades ago in North America. I hardly ever see it anymore here in the colonies since flights are not released until there is an expectation of a landing without holding at the destination. Admitedly this sort of scheme won't work for very long distance flights, but I'm unaware that JFK (etc) commonly has a problem.

[Rainboe]

Ah the good old days in the 70s of holding at JFK in a VC10 for 90 minutes on arrival! And when you left, another 90 minute queue for take-off (seems to be still like that!). But the US did an incredible job of cleaning up the holding act and it became standard to impose cruise and descent speed control (and it worked).

[seacue]

I spoke too soon above.

This late evening (May11/12) a broad band of heavy thunderstorms disrupted arrivals at Newark KEWR. A substantial portion of the arrivals could been seen holding by viewing FlightAware. They held at least 100 miles from KEWR and one at least 400 miles away over North Carolina.

Traffic to JFK and LGA didn't seem to be affected as much, but they have multiple runways which give flexibility in approach direction.

[WHBM]

At Stapleford we have the Lambourne VOR, one of the 4 holding points for Heathrow, on the airfield. This is a good place therefore to set up with a camera and a good zoom lens to get a shot of several aircraft approaching. Come down one clear weekend, set up your tripod outside the clubhouse, hope for a bit of a delay at Heathrow, and such shots should be possible. The relative position of aircraft at the different hold levels is pretty much a random distribution, so sometimes they are spread around the loop, other times they can come together.