Spotting at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport on September 18, 2022

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport (AMS) - 18 September 2022

Back in September I visited the Amsterdam Aviation Fair. I had a great time and met some really nice people. On the Sunday I had some time to kill before my return flight to Manchester at 19:10 so I decided to visit the viewing terrace in the mid-afternoon. The weather was quite awful but it did allow for some interesting wet weather shots. I think I managed a couple of hours on the terrace - occasionally sheltering under the wing of the preserved Fokker 100.

Above: The viewing area. The area to the left is the base of Pier D and offers no views

As with many old great spotting terraces, the growth of the airport around the terrace, plus the addition of extra security features, means that the views affordable from the terrace have been severely limited. Basically nowadays there are two areas of view, between the right side E and left side D gates, and between the right side D gates and left side C gates. Rather annoyingly it is a bit of a walk between the two separate views.

Above: A typical lineup along the even number E gates from E2-E24.

Below: The spotting terrace covers roughly the area of the black rectangle but the view across D pier is heavily restricted by the pier height and barriers. There is no visibility to the left of the E gates or the right of the C gates.

Above: The extent of the view from the left side of the D gates. The Delta A330 is docked at gate D3.

Above: The right side of the D gates shows one third of the available view on the right side of the spotting terrace.
Below: The odd numbered C pier gates and the furthest extent of the view on that side of the terrace.

Beyond the gates it is possible to see two of the active runways and so there is a decent, if limited, selection of shots available of aircraft at the gate, pushing back, taxiing, landing and taking off. Traffic is about as diverse as it gets at a modern airport nowadays, so basically a sea of Boeings and Airbuses with the odd regional jet thrown in!

Airline traffic is also about as good as it gets at a modern airport! By that I mean the remaining European flag carriers, lots of low cost airlines, the ME3, US majors and a few more interesting long-range airlines.

Dutch Traffic

Dutch airlines are obviously in the ascendance, especially KLM who use the visible gates regularly, with both long and short-haul types. Above are a selection of KLM mainline types taken from the terrace. I was surprised by how much KLM Asia there was about. Here's the Dutch airlines and types I saw:

KLM Cityhopper are obviously very common too and have many of their new E195-E2s in service - the first of the type I'd seen:

Transavia and TUI Fly Netherlands were a lot less common and often parked at gates that made photography a challenge:

Other European Traffic

European traffic was as expected, with several mainline national carriers having downgraded their service to regional jets. Turkish airlines had the expected strong traffic. I hadn't expected to see two Icelandair MAX-8s on the ground at the same time.

There were some highlights in the Euro traffic. Finnair was using its A350 on the Helsinki service and Flybe was back with regular Q400s. Also Air France utilised an A318. Having lived in NZ for so long this was the first one I'd ever seen.

The Rest

Given the gradual recovery from the Pandemic it wasn't surprising there wasn't quite the range of longer-haul airlines you might usually expect. However there were still some nice spots to be made. The Air Transat A321 was a beauty. A lot of the more exotic airlines use gates not visible from the viewing terrace.

Pier G

After a couple of hours on the terrace I decided to go through security, which was just as well because the queue extended outside the terminal and took nearly 1.5 hours to get through! Once through I headed towards the Easyjet gates at pier H but found my flight was leaving from the end of concourse G, which offers some great spotting opportunities, albeit through glass and in my case wet glass. By this time it was really raining and getting dark fast.

I hope you've enjoyed this quick look at what a few hours at AMS can offer when you don't have a car! Although I admit I find a lot of the modern traffic less than enthralling this trip did garner me my first Airbus A220-300, A318, A350-900 and Embraer E195-E2. Plus even the Dutch Dakota Association DC-3 came out to play too.