Heathrow Meet (and pics) – 2 January 2004

Hi all,

Just returned from Heathrow after meeting Andrew (A330Crazy) and Mark (Mark L) for a few hours. This was my second meet, the first was on the 18 September 2003, when myself, Andrew, Ren Frew and kurmitz met up at Heathrow.

I arrived at Hatton Cross at about 10.30am and met up with Andrew. Unfortunately, Mark hadn’t turned up so there was a slight problem. We waited until 11.00am for Mark but there was no sign of him, so we got on with the day. First off, we caught the free bus to the Visitor’s Centre where we would spend a few hours, since it was freezing outside.

As we passed between 9R and 9L on the bus, I noticed someone sat in an empty field… it later turned out this was Mark who was asked to leave!

Had a quick look around at the visitor’s centre and saw a few changes since my last visit about 7 months ago. We then went to the first floor and watched what was going on. Aircraft were departing from 9R and arriving on 9L, so we caught some of the heavier jets turning off of the runway in front of the centre.

For me, the highlight of the day had to be seeing Thai Airways flight TG910 departing for Bangkok. I was constantly looking onto the airfield to try and locate the 747, but had no luck. When I eventually saw it, I had to tell someone, so I smacked Andrew to get his attention (it should have been a gentle tap), but I was quite excited! 🙂

Thanks to both of you for a great day, was good fun and look forward to doing it again soon.

As we didn’t leave the visitors centre til quite late in the afternoon, we had lost the best of the light, so most of my photos are a bit dark which is a shame. You can probably see from the selection below that there was lots of South African action!