Father and son out on a trip together again, gone plane spotting in the United Arab Emirates, Sharjah in particular.
This was in April and you can almost feel the heat rising from that ramp, eh?


We were keen to score on operators from the Middle East and Central Asia, airlines which we didn't get to see in Central Europe. Operators flying into London (LHR & LGW), Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt and Paris (CDG) were well represented in our collections, but the many Russian-manufactured aircraft were welcome additions.

We spent two days on the Sharjah ramps, then hired a car and drove to Ras Al Khaimah, only to find a ramp pass for that deserted airport much too expensive and made do with a few photos over the fence. We also spent some time photographing planes landing at Dubai, that airport was too busy and did not allow airside access for photography.
And indeed we spent time at the pool of course!

We'd applied and paid for a photography permit, and were allowed to walk to the ramps where aircraft were parked.

It is obvious that quite a number of these will never fly again, but parts of it may serve as a repair on other planes.

This visit to Sharjah coincided with my start of building this website on aviation photography, concentrating mainly on multi-engined propellor transports; among the initial pages were these pages Antonov AN-8 & AN-12 and Ilyushin IL-18 at Sharjah. And, when finding out some of these planes were used for illegal purposes, this led to Victor Bout dossier.

We actually had to watch out for aircraft crossing!
They'd taxi out or in from that runway for departure or arrival.

The arrival and departure of a huge Antonov AN-124 was a highlight. Much of the day there was hardly any traffic.