Fencecheck is no more

One of my favorite web sites for modern military aviation has long been Fencecheck. It was a hangout for aviation photographers — amateur and professional alike — and was a valuable repository for us modelers. Unfortunately, I learned over the weekend that the owner of the site has shut it down.

The good news is that many Fencecheck participants are now collaborating and sharing photos in a new group on Flickr, aptly named Re-Check, which is fine for new photos going forward, but what about all the photos that had been posted on Fencecheck?

All is not completely lost. Although there’s no way to view the old discussion threads (they’re not accessible via the Wayback Machine), you can find many of the photos using Google. Here’s how.

Let’s say you’re looking for photos of T-38Cs for your upcoming build of the Trumpeter kit. Go to Google Images and enter this search query:

“T 38C" site:fencecheck.com/forums/

Most — but not all — of the resulting photos should be accessible. Simply click on an image, click the View Image button, and enjoy the photograph.

You can search for photos of any other aircraft, base, exercise, or unit by replacing T-38C as appropriate, for example Red Flag. And if it’s not obvious, you can use the same search strategy to find photos from other web sites; simply replace fence check.com/forums/ with the URL of the web site of interest.

Happy searching!