Aircraft type and airline pages now have something to read
If you clicked through from a catch to the aircraft's type page this week, you saw the problem: a heading, a card, a photo, and a "Specs" list that was empty on most types. The Boeing 737-800 page called the aircraft "737 Family" and listed no seats and no range. The Saab 340 was filed under Cirrus Aircraft. The A321neo showed an A220's photo and an A220's numbers. And the pages nobody had caught an aircraft on were hidden from search entirely — the rule was "no catch, no index", which meant the reference we hold was invisible.
That is fixed today, in four parts.
Text. Every type, airline, manufacturer and airframe page now carries a written introduction assembled from the data we actually hold — who built it, what class of machine it is, how many it seats, how far it flies, when the type first flew, how rare the card is, and how many pilots have caught one. Nothing is invented: a spec we do not have simply drops out of the sentence, and the phrasing varies per subject so hundreds of pages don't read as one template with the nouns swapped. Under the prose is a proper fact sheet.
The pages render on the server. Until now the body of a subject page was built entirely in your browser, which meant a search crawler's first look was an empty page with no text and no links. The same text you read is now baked into the HTML before anything loads.
Hubs. Three new pages — aircraft types, airlines and manufacturers — let you browse the whole tree instead of arriving at it sideways from one catch. Types are grouped by builder; airlines are sorted by how many of their airframes spotters have actually caught. They are linked from the footer of every public page.
A gate that makes sense. A page enters search when it has content worth reading: a type with a known builder and real specs, a manufacturer with a product line, an airline somebody has actually caught. Everything else stays out. That is deliberately conservative — a few thousand near-empty pages is the fastest way to teach a search engine that a young site is not worth crawling, and we have been burned by exactly that before with city pages.
Two cleanups came with it. Manufacturer URLs are readable now (/manufacturer/boeing, not /manufacturer/1092), with the old form redirecting. And the ADS-B pseudo-code GND — which is a ground vehicle marker, not an aircraft — is no longer offered to search engines as an aircraft type.
The reference itself still has wrong rows in it. There is now a repair script for those, with a hand-curated table of the designators that matter, and the corrections roll out as the table grows. If you spot an aircraft page with the wrong name, photo or numbers, tell us in Discord — that report is worth more than any scraper.