On any given day, Nancy Bliven will spend hours watching 747s roar down the runway at LAX. Which itself might not be particularly remarkable — except for the fact that she lives more than 2,000 miles away.
“I’ll turn on the 24-hour YouTube channel and put that on,” says the 68-year-old retired computer consultant from Wixom, Michigan. “It as much entertains my cats as it does me.”
Bliven is part of a growing global community of virtual plane-spotters — aviation fans who tune in remotely to livestreams of major airports. Think of it as the Bob Rossification of air travel: planes taking off and landing in high def, narrated in soothing tones by amateur broadcasters who’ve turned this niche pastime into a big-time business.
Her favorite channel? Airline Videos, a YouTube juggernaut with more than 800,000 subscribers. Three times a week, creator Kevin Ray livestreams jumbo jets arriving and departing at LAX, among other airfields, splicing in air traffic control audio, eye-catching onscreen graphics and his own colorful play-by-play that gives the whole thing the feel of a cable sports broadcast — if ESPN covered nothing but wide-body Boeings.
Other livestreaming channels have also found audiences: Airliners Live, based out of Manchester Airport in the U.K., has nearly as many live viewers as Ray’s feed. Big Jet TV, which gained fame for broadcasting during a windstorm at Heathrow, draws a half-million fans. And HD Melbourne Aviation captures takeoffs and landings from around the world and posts them after the fact to its 600,000 subscribers.
But none quite matches the polish — or the cult of personality — of Airline Videos.
“Other channels don’t have Kevin,” Bliven notes. “His big Sunday show is very entertaining, very informational, and just a lot of fun. That’s different.”
For Ray, the fascination with air travel started early. As a kid, his grandparents would take him to the airport in Lansing, Michigan, to meet incoming flights. “Just the smell of jet fuel as you came into the airport,” he recalls, “I fell in love with it.”
Screenshot/YouTube
A former TV news photographer, Ray launched the channel in 2019 as a side project. Two years later, he quit his day job. “I just wanted to take it to the next level,” he says. “How can I make it more entertaining with graphics and music and stuff like that?”
It worked. Airline Videos, which he operates from a rooftop at the LAX-adjacent H Hotel, is now his full-time gig. He declines to say how many of his viewers pay for monthly memberships — which range from $1.99 to $49.99 — but confirms he’s earning more than he did in local news. “Our biggest revenue is the memberships,” he says. Other income streams include PayPal donations and YouTube’s Super Chat, which lets viewers pin their comments on the broadcast for a fee.
His fan base ranges from the merely curious to the Marvel-level obsessives. Bliven, who is on the $24 a month subscription plan, falls somewhere in between, though she did travel from Michigan to New York to join other Rayettes for a special livestream event at the JFK airport. Other fans tune in for strictly medicinal purposes. “We’ve got people that are afraid of flying that watch because it calms their fears,” Ray says. “I almost feel like it’s my job to be a comfort for a lot of people around the world.”
Plane-spotters at LAX in 2007, long before YouTube made it easy to watch takeoffs and landings from the comfort of your laptop.
Charles Ommanney/Getty Images
That job is only becoming more viable. In February, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan revealed that, for the first time, more people are viewing YouTube programs like Ray’s on TV sets than on mobile or desktop devices. In other words, as more consumers abandon traditional media for creator-led content, broadcasters like Ray are poised to become even bigger stars than they already are.
Still, Ray warns, “Just pointing a camera at the sky won’t make you famous.” The space is getting crowded. “In the last three years, you go on YouTube and there’s airport livestreams all around the world,” he says. “It’s like we opened the floodgate.”
This story appeared in the May 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
