Five live cameras around Schiphol on the A4 and the A9
At 03:12 this morning the camera at knooppunt De Hoek had an almost empty A4 running away under orange lighting, one car with its lights smeared across the frame, and a long line of green and white lights lying along the far edge of the picture. That far edge is Schiphol. De Hoek sits 3.1 km from the middle of the airport, and of everything on our map it is the camera that gets closest.
I went looking because people search for a Schiphol webcam and land on pages that embed something and hope. So I counted instead. Asking our own index for live cameras within 15 km of 52.3105, 4.7683, the point I used for the middle of the airfield, returned 33 on 2026-10-20, and you can walk the same ring on the Netherlands page. Five of the 33 are Rijkswaterstaat motorway cameras, and those five are the ones worth a tab.
The five on the A4 and the A9
A4 knooppunt De Hoek, 3.1 km out, looks south-west along the carriageway with the airport lights across the top of the frame. It is the one to open if you want to know whether the A4 is moving before you commit to it.
A4 Amsterdam-Sloten, 4.6 km, sits in a cutting where the slip road curves away under a blue sign gantry. Tighter, and more useful, because this is where the airport traffic and the city traffic argue with each other.
My favourite of the five is A9 Amstelveen, 5.4 km out, and it is the odd one. The motorway runs across the frame with the Amstelveen rail line immediately beside it, a platform lit up at the left, and the whole thing dug about and fenced for the works that have been going on there for years. Two kinds of transport and a building site in one shot.
Nine kilometres out, A9 Rottepolderplein gives the best picture of the lot after dark, looking down on a full cloverleaf where the A9 meets the A200, every loop picked out in its own string of lights, red signals on the gantries at the top. At three in the morning there is nothing on it and it is lovely.
The far corner of the ring is A9 knooppunt Holendrecht at 12.0 km, a gantry over the A9 with the towers of Amsterdam Zuidoost standing behind it.
All five arrive as 320 by 180 pixel stills, which is small, and three of them name their hardware in the file: Axis P5655-E domes on the A9 at Amstelveen and at Rottepolderplein, a P5624-E-MkII at Holendrecht. They are fresh, too. The Amstelveen frame our site served me at 01:13:42 UTC on 2026-10-20 carried a capture time of 03:12:17 in the camera's own clock, which is 01:12:17 UTC, so it reached me 85 seconds old.
The camera in Amstelveen that prints the wind on the picture
Seven kilometres east of the middle of the airfield there is a private camera on a roof, mscha.cam, looking out over a dark park and a street of houses towards a green glow on the horizon. Its operator's page gives the position as 52.283088, 4.863684 and says the readings come from their own Weathercloud station. The frame I pulled this morning carried the header "Tue 20 Oct 2026 - 03:16 - mscha.cam 2.1" and, along the bottom, this: @3:00: 8°C - E 3 Bft - 1020 hPa - 68% rh - 0.0 mm - vis 10+ km - sun 8:14/18:35.
Then I checked it. KNMI's official observations for Schiphol at 03:00 on 2026-10-20 read 7.6 °C, wind east at 3 Bft or 5.42 m/s, visibility 50 km, pressure 1021.0 hPa. A hobbyist on a roof in Amstelveen and the national weather service, one hour, within half a degree and one hectopascal of each other. That is a camera you can trust about more than the view, and the sunrise and sunset it prints, 8:14 and 18:35, tell you exactly which hours these cameras are any use at all.
I would like to take the next step and tell you which runway that easterly puts the arrivals on, because that is the thing a spotter actually wants. That one I cannot do. No page publishing Schiphol's runway in use has turned up that I can fetch and link, and guessing it from a wind reading is not the same thing. If you know of one, I want it.
The rest of the ring, and the thing that is not there
Further out the ring stops being about the airport and starts being about living near it. Haarlem Zaanenlaan at 13.6 km is a quiet residential street with one streetlight blown right out, and its burnt-in clock read 02:10:31 when local time was 03:16, so take an hour off anything you read there. Nieuwkoop at 12.8 km turns out to be pointed at the Surfclub Ter Aar car park, empty board racks and a line of lights along a far bank, which will be a much better camera in July.
The thing that is not there is the airfield. None of the 33 cameras in that 15 km ring is on the airport itself, and the Polderbaan views people watch are private streams rather than anything a public authority publishes, so there is nothing of that kind for us to index and nothing for me to link.
What we do about these five is check them every day and keep the result on each camera page, which is why I can tell you they were all returning pictures this morning rather than guessing. The number I still owe you is the refresh interval. I measured how old one frame was, which is not the same as how often a new one arrives, and I want to sample all five across a working day and put a real figure on each page. Ask me again in a week.