On a recent Saturday, several hundred people flocked to Los Angeles International Airport and spent most of the day looking at airplanes—all because they follow the same airline-industry blog. That sentence may require some explanation even if you’ve read a post or two on Cranky Flier, the commercial-aviation chronicle written by industry veteran Brett Snyder.
The “avgeek” gathering Snyder calls Cranky Dorkfest began in 2011. Snyder, based nearby in Long Beach, decided to see whether any of his readers—many of whom regularly show up in comments on his blog under aviation-related pseudonyms—wanted to meet up. He suggested a triangular park between LAX’s Runway 24R and an In-N-Out Burger that offers some of America’s finest plane spotting.
“The original plan was really just me putting out a blog post saying that I was going to go to the park across from In-N-Out and hoped some people would join me for burgers, spotting, and conversation,” Synder says in an email. “A handful did. And then it just kept growing from there.”
The idea took off because the notion of people meeting online over a shared fascination and then connecting IRL shouldn’t be that strange. Especially if their meeting point happens to revolve around their common interest.
Soon airlines, flight-tracking apps and services, and Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) started taking notice and finding ways to participate, perhaps because of or despite its self-mocking moniker of “Dorkfest.” (I got some raised eyebrows explaining the event to friends.)
“You have to own it,” says Snyder, whose job title at his travel agency, Cranky Concierge, is “president and chief airline dork.”
Plane selfies
The 2025 edition of Dorkfest began early on September 13 at a ramp on the south side of the airport hosted by LAWA. The authority required attendees to register in advance; a week later, signups maxed out at 500.
Attendees had the treat of two parked airliners to explore at length: American Airlines sent a Boeing 737-800 from its throwback “Astrojet” livery and Delta Air Lines loaned an Airbus A350-900. With almost everybody wanting a flight-deck selfie, boarding took awhile.
LAWA catered breakfast from the local favorite Randy’s Donuts and brought a DJ, who spun location- and subject-relevant tracks like A Tribe Called Quest’s “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Aeroplane.”
A large fraction of the attendees ignored all of that to stand next to a fence separating the area from an active taxiway so they could take in the view of arrivals and departures on LAX’s two southern runways—plus a Boeing 747-8 freighter operated by Cathay Pacific Cargo taxiing nearby.
“I hope people have travel plans soon”
A few hours later, it was time to head over to the In-N-Out that’s become my favorite fast-food joint in the world. People opened ride-hailing apps for the short ride and waited for their Ubers and Lyfts to roll up, which is when I ran into a friend from grade and high school, an aviation lawyer I hadn’t seen since March of 2020.
The lunchtime scene at this In-N-Out is always great, since that block overlaps with the start of a wave of arrivals of wide-body jets from overseas. Even with a few hundred extra people added to the noon crowd, the place remained as marvelously efficient as I’ve seen it in past visits to L.A.
As attendees cycled their gaze from flight-tracking apps to each Boeing 777 or Airbus A350 arriving from places like Shanghai, Paris, Rome, or Singapore, Snyder conducted a raffle drawing, with prizes contributed by a flock of companies.
Struggling to be heard over the roar of jet engines even with the help of a megaphone, Snyder cracked jokes as he called out winners of goodies such as a subscription to the aviation-industry publication The Air Current, free tickets or frequent-flyer miles from various airlines (“I hope people have travel plans soon,” he said while awarding 20,000 points from bankrupt Spirit Airlines), models of planes, and bundles of airline swag.
One airline had a formal presence: Recently merged Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines sent reps to hand out their inflight snacks of pretzel mix, Biscoff cookies, and POG (passionfruit orange guava) juice to any attendees not already stuffed from animal-style Double-Doubles.
Other years have seen more in-person airline participation. Snyder recalls 2019’s Dorkfest, when Oscar Munoz, then-CEO of United Airlines, showed up and handed out burgers.
The day wrapped up with an event hosted by NYCAviation at a food hall called the Proud Bird, situated across Aviation Boulevard from LAX’s other pair of runways. The plane that drew the most cheers out from the audience was not any passenger airliner but a more esoteric airframe: a McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 freighter operated by FedEx, the final version in a series of triple-engine wide-bodies dating to the DC-10.
That New York aviation-enthusiast group had started its own annual SpotLAX meetup a few years after Dorkfest began, then opted to align that gathering with Snyder’s.
“We realized we should keep doing that,” Snyder says. “It really increased the opportunities for people to participate and helped justify travel from farther away to come join.”
The two farthest origin points for 2025’s Dorkfest, per a map at the Great Circle Mapper site generated from attendee input: Shizuoka, Japan, and Haikou, China.
Most real-world meetups of online communities don’t draw people from that far away—with the exception of high-profile gatherings like the NASA Socials that the space agency hosts for launches. On one I joined for the penultimate space shuttle launch in 2011, I was struck by how readily strangers agreed to coordinate on shared housing and rental-car transportation.
Often these gatherings are much smaller-scale, like Wikipedia-editor meetups, the weekly happy hours coordinated by some local Reddit forums (see, for example, those at r/washingtondc) or just two members of the FlyerTalk frequent-travel forum recognizing each other’s yellow “FT” luggage tags in an airport lounge.
It may be weird showing up to these events. But attendees tend to embrace the weirdness and the chance to get to know strangers who maybe aren’t so distant from them.
As Snyder says: “The best moments are meeting people who I’ve never seen other than in [a] discussion online.”
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