As rentierhood begins to grow on me, it was to be expected that a new, sillier hobby would find me soon enough. This one crept up in the unlikeliest of circumstances.
Those that have been with me for a while know that I tend to grieve whenever one of the few sports team I follow goof up on their adventures, and the magnitude of the grief unfortunately is proportional to the square of the likelihood of the victory that was thwarted. (My father still brings up the incident of the nearly empty 1.5 litre Coca Cola bottle that he found on opening the fridge the morning after we lost to Bangladesh in the 2007 cricket World Cup). As one ages, one tends to find softer avenues to drown ones sorrows in, and this time, as Manchester United whimpered out of the Champions' League to Sevilla just after 3 am, I was too distraught to climb into bed and decided to read up on the upkeep of the couple of flowering plants that have managed to bear with me up here on these 17th floor surroundings.
A couple of hours into this journey through some of the geekier corners of the internet, I was disturbed by the noise of an aircraft flying overhead. Living on the north-west edge of the Pune metropolitan area has several advantages - proximity to Mumbai and remoteness from the Pune airport are just some of them. While I had noticed an occasional aeroplane, I had never observed one at this shallow an altitude over my digs. Visiting flightradar24 was for me the work of a moment.
My fellow-members of the Worrier Caste worship this website, of course. Anytime a near-and-dear-one or their near-and-dear-one is flying anywhere, I tend to track their progress here. You should try it - a more fool-proof way of stopping others from sharing their travel plans with you is yet to be devised.
Anyhow, turns out this was a Pune-Bengaluru flight. Headed westwards from Pune airport? Turns out aircraft take-off and land in not necessarily the same direction all the time. Pune's east-west runway apparently throws out these aircraft usually eastwards since hardly anything else lies to the west of the pseudo-international airport that is PNQ, but on this one occasion, when I was awake and licking my wounds, this intricate conspiracy was hatched to launch one westwards. Now, if it was a northerly, it would have turned right and never showed up above Hinjewadi. But this was headed south, so it turned left, somewhere above the abomination that is the Wakad flyover, apparently, and glided right over me. Just when I was awake at the ungodly hour of 5 am.
Obviously, tracking every other flight that was in the Maharashtrian sky was the next thing to do. Guessing (wrongly) the total number of airports in the home-state came next. Googling every equipment in the sky was the further logical move. It's been two days since that fateful bird rumbled overhead and I have become an addict.
A helpful air-force pilot too decided to chip in sometime Thursday afternoon, to help me realize that those lot don't show up on flightradar. Rather obvious, I acknowledged immediately, but hadn't really thought about it till then. Then I started hunting for private jets, and had to dip into my memories of the Scottsdale airfield for certainty of sightings. Sure enough, those do show up. A helicopter off Mumbai - probably headed to the offshore oil rig at Bombay High - also made an appearance.
Quite a decent time is being had, unquestionably. If this leads to some work I will be terribly disappointed..
