Since a little adventure is always welcome and since I didn't really felt like working my ass off the following day, we decided to try to enter the capital's traffic madness upon the large private jet's departure in the Netherlands. She knew she had to ask me because "I'm always the most plausible option when looking for people to do something a little crazy." I wasn't convinced we'd get to see it but we could always try!
So, there we where, at the entrance gate of a cemetary at the end of the large and mostly privately used runway 25R, no spotters in sight. However, when entering the village of Steenokkerzeel we did pass by a large crowd lined up facing the assumed approach glidepath. This got kind of surreal at one moment when we knew the bird was in the air, we knew all surrounding airspace had been cleared and I checked a couple of aviation radar applications. Airspace was indeed empty according to this, yet when looking up we spotted the lights of something I can only presume was a Blackhawk patrolling the area, I heard the distinctive sound of a fighter jet circling the air exclusion zone high above the clouds out of our sight, but we did not spot our target. When visually combing the skies it became more and more clear that in contrast to all publicly available data, airspace was most definitely not empty by a long shot.
Suddenly the Tweet flashed upon my screen "AF1 landed at EBBR via Runway 07L", those sneaky bastards re-routed the approach. Not wanting to admit failure I decided to drive straight towards the checkpoints around Abelag's private aviation terminal, where I had spotted the jet parked once before. There was an insane amount of police present and naturally we got sent in other directions than the one we wanted to go since the Presidential motorcade was just getting on the move. The evening got even more surreal when realising that we where one of the few vehicles deliberately trying to join the chaos instead of escaping, we crossed the motorway and saw the chaos below us, the motorway closed off and an every few meters a vehicle flashing it's blue lights. At this point I reverted to driving in circles literally, some of the checkpoints must have seen us come by seven times and at about the seventh time we noticed they where gradually moving back.
We ditched the car nearby and walked over to one of the bridges crossing the motorway with a lovey view of the Abelag buildings, we saw the flashing lights of security vehicles on the tarmac but still no AF1 in sight.
We waited for the officers to clear up their cones and took a walk towards the Abelag buildings and when passing one of the parking lots I got the first glimps of that big shiny 747, surrounded by security vehicles, covered by bright tarmac lighting, that the most powerful man in the world may call his private jet. Pushing our luck, we managed to reach the access gate to the terminal and found ourselves at about 60 meters away with the gate opening every now and then to allow the security vehicles to pass. We stood there for a while, tried to take some pictures with the crappy cameras we had with us, made some smalltalk with a couple of local employees and just enjoyed the view. Nobody wanted to borrow us a good camera as they thought we might get our crazy asses arrested and our equipment impounded, so the resulting pictures are lighted very badly but you get the idea: An open gate, and an impressive plane flying by the famous callsign "Air Force One" sitting on the tarmac meters away. If I sprinted, I might have made it to within 20 meters, before probably being gunned down by secret service staff as a suspected terrorist threatening this symbol of worldwide influence the United States of America has.
This might just be closest we'll ever get to that bird, and it's probably closer than the majority of the world ever will...
