Video still of a Eurowings aeroplane taking off at dusk

Modern air travel is an odd phenomenon. I’m reliably informed that mile for mile it’s the safest way to get from point A to point B - regardless of where in the world those points are actually located.

That’s probably true when taken on the average, but when a commercial plane goes down, there’s almost always carnage, and it’s covered in depth as part of the 24-hour news cycle. There’s international coverage of the crash, the search for survivors, the black box recovery, and the inevitable inquests, inquiries, and quest for someone to blame.

So, when a friend or relation travels abroad by air, I’m always slightly more worried than I should be. Sure, they’ll probably be fine, but what if they’re not?

My son has travelled extensively around eastern Europe, the ‘stans, and the far east over the past few years, and it addition to checking the arrivals and departures boards on airport websites, I also track the flight in real-time as it zips across a virtual globe.

As the plane comes in to land at Krakow, Frankfurt, or some middle-of-nowhere airfield on the the Steppes, I can even watch through webcams. Same for takeoff - knowing he’s safely up in the air or down on the ground, I can relax for a few hours.

These aren’t your common-or-garden setups, either. They’re generally good enough to capture the exact instant of takeoff. You can grab a respectable still of an object tvelling at around 200 MPH, in the dark.

But coming back into the UK - particularly the North, it’s a non-starter. Typically, he’ll be landing at Liverpool or Manchester. While Manchester airport has a plane spotting channel that sometimes livestreams straight to YouTube, the group behind it doesn’t work 24 hours per day and may be looking in another direction at a fancier or more unusual plane.

Liverpool airport (named after John Lennon for some reason) doesn’t even have plane spotting fans. Instead, there is a webcam on top of the flight traing school that hasn’t worked in at least the past five years, and a couple of webcams on the Runcorm Bridge that don’t work, either.

It’s a bit shit.