Rhodes Plane Spotting

[Rachal Langwith]

RhodesDiagoras is the fourth busiest airport in Greece with 3.3 Mio passengers in 2021 and the gateway to one of greeks most popular holiday destination. The sun always shines, the variety of traffic is awsome and there are great spots for photography. There is just one runway 07/25 and 25 is used for the vast majority of the time due to the prevailing winds what makes spotting pretty easy. The movements start from around 8am and the mornings tend to be busiest with traffic dropping off after lunchtime. Weekends tend to be busier although Tuesday is busy with German flights. The main travel season is from June till August. In winter (November-April) the airport is almost dead except some flights to the mainland.

The mix of traffic is very good with the usual holiday charter and subcharters from northern Europe, plus quite a few from Italy and Eastern Europe. The bonus though are regular flights from Israel with 5 or 6 per day including Arkia, Israir, ElAl (787/777!). Add the occasional military flight (E145/C130) and the odd biz jet, plus hardly any EZY/RYR flights and it all makes for great variety. Almost all flights dont stay longer as 1-2 hours on the ground so there is always an opportunity to take a picture from the plane you are looking for, especially if something special is coming in.

Like many other airports in greece, the ownership of Rhodes was taken over from the greek state by the FRAPORT AG which is going to renovate the whole area. This includes the installation of new barbed wire or closing of photos holes which already happened.

July 2024: Thanks to some rude spotters, who destroyed the fence, this spot is unuseable as of now. Police is guarding the place sending away any cars stopping here. Please keep away from this spot for now! No problems at this location during our stay, even with a ladder.

Nothing nearby. Food/Drinks available in the village of Paradeisi or the airport view restaurant if you follow the road along the perimeter fence.

Be careful when military is moving.FOCAL LENGTH20-200mm should be fine for everythingPhotos taken from the elevated position:

var fodr = []; fodr[0] = "*"; Photos from the elevated position

9A: Vacate C. The aircraft will loose part of the gears soon after the turn so be ready. You can still get airplanes vacating D on the runway but probably still with the reverse thrust (check TUI and British). Nice take offs during rotation.

H there, we can confirm that and encountered no problem as well at any of the locations. At spot 8 there is a small stone which you can use to clear the fence or you climb on the abandonend building right net to this spot.

-Julian

Pretty annoying to hear all those things. Especially that the police sends spotters away from point 2 as this is a well known location for years!

Robberies can happen everywhere and I hope these guys gets imprisoned soon!

I left a warning in the guide and hope the situation becomes better for the summer season 2024.

-Julian

Dear Planespotter,

We went to Rhodos and made use of spots 3 (hill) and 7 (restaurant). All are fine. During summer, the road up to the hill is accessible by car.

From insite the terminal after security check, taking pictures is possible, too. Have fun.

Hello! I am a pilot who landed this morning around 10.30 local time (22/08) and I saw some spotters on spot 4. If anyone of them happens to read this message and would like to share their pictures, can you please drop me a message. I would really appreciate it. Thanks ?

I was born in early 1918 in Banta, a small town just northwest of Tracy in San Joaquin County. My parents, Harry and Irene Amelia Canale Rhodes, raised me on the family ranch, which was homesteaded by my grandparents, Jacob and Anna Hannah Rhodes.

Higher education, I instead believed, was the key to a better future. My parents had gone only as far as the eighth-grade. My grandpa ran the grocery store in Banta and my family expected that I would either join in running the store or stay on the ranch with my dad. But I went to school instead.

Tunney was a former heavyweight boxing champion who was also a Navy lieutenant commander. He was touring recruiting stations nationwide and he convinced me. A few of us enlisted on the spot, and Gene Tunney swore us in. I was allowed to remain in the USC Masters program until the U.S. joined the war, but that came very soon.

When I arrived, the Navy changed my orders and sent me to Norfolk, Va. There were four of us from San Francisco who made the trip: Bobby Feller, Sammy Chapman, an athlete from Berkeley and myself, all recruited in our hometowns.

During my time as an instructor I trained about seven companies with 90 recruits each, most of them just high-school age kids. I spent most of the time getting them in shape, taking them out and sweating them to death. That would take a lot of pounds off them.

There were about 20 in our group from all over. They put us in a hot gymnasium and we spent most of the time learning to use the electronic cipher machine. This was the newest intelligence tool and it enabled the Navy to securely send messages throughout the world.

We also had to learn important security procedures. We spent three months learning how to type the number codes, then for hours practiced typing five-letter codes. Those codes were changed every hour for integrity.

In November of 1943, I was ordered to Pearl Harbor and assigned to the communications pool under Navy Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. There were about 100 of us on the team. This was a great duty, living up in the hills of Oahu, very pleasant.

There had been a real problem in the Pacific when the amphibious craft could not make their landings because of the large coral reefs and shallow waters. In previous battles, all hell broke loose when the Japs had the high point on both sides, and our landing craft were stuck on the coral. They were just machine-gunning our guys. Thousands of kids in those situations lost their lives. It was a sad, dreary time, and every kid was a hero. We knew we had to get rid of the coral so that our amphibious craft could make their landings. So in early 1944, they ordered me out in the Pacific quickly because of my communications background.

Each of our task forces worked on 93-foot-long wooden ships. They were called YMS, yard mine sweepers, and most of them were made in Stockton. These wooden ships were safe to maneuver close to magnetic mines and also around acoustic mines. They were the workhorses of minesweeping in the Pacific.

In the beginning we used Japanese charts of the islands because the U.S. did not have any of its own. We had to determine the depth of the water to decide which type of mine to lay: acoustic or magnetic.

At that time, we had the Third Fleet and the Fifth Fleet. These consisted of the same ships for the most part, except for separate commanders. Admiral William F. Halsey was assigned the Third Fleet and Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, the Fifth Fleet.

The USS Terror was our control ship, with a lot of electronics on it, including radar. Each wooden yard minesweeper was always communicating with us. We would be on the front lines, laying our own mines. It was our job as we moved closer to the Japanese mainland, our ultimate attack target. One fleet was always ready to go and the other one was always preparing. My job was to make sure we followed the plan I was given to clear the way for the fleet ships.

The technical people were under me. The key to mine-squad work was maintaining integrity under the water: checking mines, disarming Japanese mines, laying our own mines, blasting coral reefs, identifying and clearing invasion routes, and recon. It was dangerous work, as each mine had about 600 pounds of TNT. We went through all of the possible invasion passages, clearing Japanese mines.

Almost all of the islands we were working on were atolls, rings of land or coral with water in the middle. Most were old volcanoes, and we were there to clear out the lagoons to make anchorages for the fleets. The big atoll we were involved with was Ulithi, a key American base between the Yap islands and the Philippines. Yap was a major power base for the Japanese.

My typical day of work aboard the Terror was getting up at 5 a.m. to eat and check in at the shipboard communication center, which I worked in. We would receive messages, then decode them, type them up and take them to Captain Clark. Sometimes I was called out at night to decode messages, and I had to change the cipher code daily for security. Aboard ship I wore a key wheel, which could be inserted into the electronic coding machine and dialed in with the proper date to break the code.

There were six wheels and four classes of code. After the communications work was done, I would go out in a small boat and update charts as the swim boys set red flags to triangulate obstacles for destruction. The Navy was unique, because its logs of every action and of every unit were written and communicated daily to Washington. There was always a carrier ship nearby to send them off.

Things were just happening at intense levels out there, with extreme damage and the constant threat of attack from the sea and from the air, where kamikazes were always looking for targets. But our morale remained high. Even though some of these kids were just three months out of boot camp, they and the officers were a close-knit group. There was always someone protecting your back no matter who or what rank you were. When we were doing mine operations and going boat to boat, we even took off our insignia, went shirtless and wore shorts just to survive the heat.

On Oct. 17, we were anchored in the Ngulu Lagoon in the Caroline Islands. The crew spotted a mine floating close to the ship, but the wind quickly made the ship drift just enough to connect with the mine, which exploded.

I was a half-mile across the lagoon on a small, 50-foot boat spotting enemy mines and reporting their locations. When I saw the explosion we headed back. We all worked as quickly as we could to stop the water from flooding into the ship. Four crew members were killed, but we kept the Montgomery afloat. She was towed to Ulithi and then back to San Francisco, where she was decommissioned.

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