Aircraft in the sky now have their own shape
Until today every aircraft in the 3D sky was one of about eight generic shapes: an airliner, a widebody, a business jet, a light single, a helicopter and so on. A Boeing 737 and an Airbus A320 had the same shape, and a Citation was the same jet whether it was a Mustang or a Longitude. From far away that did not matter much. Up close, next to a tag that names the exact model, it did.
Now each aircraft is built from a small description of its type: span, length, tail height, where the wing sits, where the engines hang, what the tail looks like, what the landing gear is. The numbers come from two public sources: the FAA Aircraft Characteristics Database and the EUROCONTROL Aircraft Performance Database. Snapshots of both are in our repository, and the build reads them from there, so a deploy never has to ask anyone's server for anything.
The table covers 407 types: every designator our receivers have heard that one of the two sources lists. A few home-built kits are missing because neither source has them, and the odd shapes (Beluga, B-52, V-22, E-3) have their own post. A type we don't have still gets a model of the right family and roughly the right size.
What it is. A silhouette at the right proportions: a 777-300ER is longer than an A350-900, a Dash 8 sits on a high wing, a CRJ hangs its engines on the tail under a T-tail, a Falcon 7X carries three engines at the back. Each model is checked by a test that measures it and compares span, length, tail height and engine count against the table.
What it is not. It isn't a copy of the real surface, and there are no airline liveries. Tail colours still come from the aircraft's hex, as before.
Where the sources disagree. For 20 types the FAA and EUROCONTROL numbers differ by more than six percent. We draw the FAA value and keep the other one next to it. The most visible case is the A330-300: the FAA lists a tail height more than four metres lower than its own A330-200, so the -300 currently looks a little short. We would rather show that honestly than pick a winner from memory.
On phones the sky uses a lighter version of each model and keeps fewer of them in memory, because a busy hub was the thing most likely to run a phone out of memory.
On type pages, scroll down on any covered type, for example the Boeing 737-800, and a 3D model appears. Drag to turn it; double-click to let it spin again. The caption names the source of the numbers.
Next, we fill the empty wingspan and length fields on the type pages themselves from the same table, so the pages print the dimensions the model is built from. Spot something that looks wrong on a type you know well? Tell us in Discord.