Rare Bird.(The Talk of the Town)(Airbus A380)

For all its eccentricities, bird-watching is a respectable hobby, practiced by psychiatrists, kings, and forty-six million Americans. But plane spotting--which also entails tramping around swamps to watch flying objects--somehow lacks the same cachet.

Phil Derner, Jr., the president of the Web site NYCAviation.com, estimates that there are fifty active plane spotters in the New York City area. At noon last Monday, nearly all of them were gathered, telephoto lenses in hand, in North Woodmere Park, which is situated at the head of Jamaica Bay and beneath the flight path to Runway 22 Left at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The occasion: the maiden arrival, from Frankfurt, of the double-decker Airbus A380, the largest passenger plane in the world. (It was on a promotional and "route-proving" trip organized by Airbus and Lufthansa.) During its development, the A380 had been trouble for Airbus, with production delays resulting in cancelled orders and layoffs. But the Airbus is big and she is rare, and that is more than enough to bring out a crowd of plane geeks.

A tenth grader named Matt--he asked that his last name not be used, since he was skipping school--had travelled from Westchester with his father, a lawyer. "I think the A380 is a landmark in aviation," Matt said, explaining why he had come. "My mom was really against the idea."

"It's his passion," his father said. "We were struggling for a while, because he wants to be a pilot, and we want him to be an engineer. We have only one kid, so a pilot seems kind of, you know." Matt recently started taking an online course in Danish, to prepare himself for a job with Scandinavian Airlines. "They have a really good fleet, a lot of long-range A330s and A340s," he said, before excusing himself to watch a Singapore Airlines 747-400 on its final approach.

The spotters had been nervous for days. J.F.K. has four runways, some as long as fourteen thousand feet, which can be used in either direction. That means dozens of spotting sites, some miles apart, and it wouldn't be possible to know in advance which runway the Airbus would use. "The thing that will suck is that if we are at N. Woodmere, and ...