In late July, we received word that two Home Office charter flights were set to deport hundreds of men to West Africa, on the evening of the 28th. One was scheduled to leave from Stansted Airport, so we went to have a look.

The people being deported are people who, for various reasons, have been denied the right to stay in the UK. They could be asylum seekers whose claims have been refused, people who were living and working in Britain without the correct documentation, or people with overseas citizenship who committed criminal offences and were being deported at the end of their sentence. The Home Office has run over 800 such flights since 2001.

The charter flights, which are an alternative to placing deportees on commercial flights alongside other passengers, round up large groups of people from the same region and make several stops.

It's difficult to know who exactly is on the flights, but some will have been living in the UK since childhood. Others might never have set foot in the country to which they are being deported.

Women are deported, too.

It's also difficult to know if the deportees have been given due legal process. A key element of the government's immigration detention system was recently found by the High Court to be so "structurally unfair" as to be unlawful.

At Stansted, the charter flights depart from the private jet centre - well away from the public airport terminals.

For the private companies that facilitate such flights, deportation is part of their business. If you've ever taken a package holiday, you might even have sat on the plane that was being used this evening. Coaches bring the deportees to the airport, where they are transferred on to the waiting plane.

The jet waits on the runway. Photo: James Bridle/Flickr

The deportees were escorted by guards employed by a private security company that is contracted by the Home Office to handle deportations.

A deportee is escorted onto the plane by guards. Photo: James Bridle/Flickr

An inquest found a culture of "pervasive racism" among company employees.

Watching the flight with me was James Bridle, whose artwork "Seamless Transitions" explores Britain's hidden spaces of immigration detention and deportation.

As we watched, through a fence in the airport car park, flight preparations continued.

We were in an area where plane spotters are normally allowed to stand and take photos, but after a few hours our presence became unwelcome.

A police officer told us that while we weren't doing anything wrong, we were on private land and that airport security wanted us to leave. Talking into his radio, he referred to the deportation flight as a "repat" flight.

There is a spot on public land where you can watch planes take off. We waited until the small hours of the morning before the plane taxied to the runway. As it prepared to take off, several security vans parked directly in front of us with their lights flashing, which made it difficult to take photos in the dark.

Flight Radar 24 is a free website where you can track the progress of flights in real-time.

Our flight crossed Europe and the Mediterranean during the night, making two stops in West Africa - Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana - the next morning. It returned to the UK that afternoon, landing at Gatwick. We don't know what happened to the people who were on the flight.

Daniel Trilling is an editor at New Humanist. The original Storify of his visit, from which this article is taken, appears here. You can follow his work on refugees in Europe here.

The rest of James Bridle's photographs are on Flickr.