As a three-year-old, Jonathan Dinetz had himself a ritual. It went like this: after each of his weekly indoor swimming lessons in San Bruno, he would get a donut, walk with his mother past a flight agency that displayed airplane models in its window and make his way towards the San Francisco International Airport.

“Then I’d go watch planes land,” sophomore Jonathan said. “We’d kind of sit in the shoulder of a freeway offramp and I’d just watch these huge aircraft flyers.”

For upwards of six hours at a time, Jonathan illustrates these airport layouts: the runways, the terminals, they’re all there.  Everything’s to scale too: every one-eighth of an inch represents 100 feet.

“It’s this weird fascination with airplanes. There’s something beautiful about them,” Jonathan said, letting out a soft laugh.

He used to sit down with enormous rolls of paper, the bigger the better. 

“I’d take a Sharpie or something like that and get after it,” Jonathan said.

He’s shrunk his drawings down over the years, he said, but each piece can take three weeks to a month if Jonathan works every couple days for a couple hours. The collective drawing from start to finish would probably be around 24 hours.

Every day over the summer Jonathan worked on his airports. For a while he tried to work on them in class, but that resulted in little success. One of these classes was Law and Society, taught by social studies teacher Janine Sohn.

Sohn discovered his hobby through Teacher Dashboard, which she uses to monitor students’ online activity during class to ensure that they are on task.

“I kept noticing that very often I would see pictures of airports and runways and such when I would see Jonathan’s screen,” Sohn said. “The first couple of times I didn’t think anything of it and after a while I started to see a pattern.”

Curious, she asked him what he was doing and discovered his affinity for airport aesthetics.

“[He had] a little twinkle in his eye,” Sohn said. “You could tell this was his thing.”

Sohn said Jonathan took her World Cultures class as a freshman and remembered him as a quirky student then too. One assignment asked that students create culture boxes, which they decorate with symbols of their interests, dislikes and other parts of their identity.

“The one thing he put as ‘likes and dislikes’ is that he disliked Victorian wallpaper,” Sohn said. “He actually took the time to find Victorian wallpaper to put it on his culture box.”

Airports and wallpaper seem completely disparate, but Jonathan’s interest — or aversion — to both suggests that visualization significantly influences his mental processes.

His mother Kathleen Dinetz said that his strong recognition of visual detail might explain his interest in  such complex images. Namely, he is a whiz at memorizing images like the bays and countries of the world, she said.

“Let’s say you’re talking about the Civil War and these different battles,” Kathleen said. “As they discuss it, he sees it.”

Jonathan’s inner eye comes alive when he draws on the smooth glass table at his grandparents’ house.

“I just sit there in my shorts and put some headphones on and just kind of roll,” Jonathan said.

Usually he starts with a straightedge on the runways. Then come the taxiways. Last come the details, such as gates. As he draws, he consults everything from Google Maps to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations so his drawings will be as accurate as possible.

Jonathan said he most enjoys looking at airports like Chicago O’Hare International.

“It’s this nasty matrix of runways,” Jonathan said. “It’s completely dangerous. I like a little bit of chaos,” Jonathan said.

When a drawing is “really insane” he may send it to a friend, but he doesn’t bother explaining what’s going on. He has yet to meet anyone who sees eye to eye with him.

“I never talk to anyone about them,” Jonathan said. “Obviously it’s very complex to explain. Sometimes I show them to my dad, but it’s really hard to get across to people.”

Jonathan has searched for others who share his interest in drawing airports. He said he wishes he could find some source of appreciation or criticism of his work.

His discoveries include a UC Berkeley class about airport design, which he said was ineligible to take, both because he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree and because they didn’t respond to his email he sent to them. He also found legitimate airport firms.

“But actual drawings, like a YouTube video of someone doing this? There’s no way,” Jonathan said.

His history with transportation illustration can be traced back through periods of drawing floor designs of airplanes, sketches of yachts and boats that even bordered on interior design. Before all of this, however, came his love for flight.

Kathleen recognized that young children, especially boys, tend to have an interest in planes, cars and other types of transportation. Jonathan would design and duplicate planes all the time in kindergarten and first grade, she said. In second grade he could identify the kind of plane flying in the air just by looking at it and memorize seating configurations. Adults who had recently traveled became frequent subjects of interest for Jonathan, who would question them about the kinds of planes they had flown.

She was left without a doubt that Jonathan’s interest was exceptional after she observed his interactions with another boy as they played on a tree swing during a birthday party.

Jonathan asked the boy what kind of plane he flew in on. The boy didn’t know the airport, the model or even the color of the plane, to Jonathan’s dismay.

“[Jonathan] goes, ‘Alright, alright, let’s try something easy: How many seats were in the plane?’” Kathleen said. “Then Jonathan walks away and goes, ‘He doesn’t know anything.’”

Jonathan was five or six years old. Since then he’s never quite lost the sheer awe he felt as a child watching the planes come and go. At airports, he’ll be at the window looking out, he said.

“It’ll be kind of odd because sitting next to me is like a three-year-old also who’s watching,” Jonathan said.

Reflecting on his devotion to airport design, Jonathan said that it illustrates  that he cannot be labelled. He can play football and have a self-described nerdy and unique hobby on the side.

“I can do whatever I want,” he said.

The only question, then, is what that will be.

“I think I would be satisfied doing this for the rest of my life,” Jonathan said. “To a normal person I think it’d be a very monotonous experience. But I don’t know. It all seems to flow.”