Every caught aircraft now has a page — and so does its type, maker and airline
Ships have had their own pages for a while — every spotted vessel links to its shipyard, flag state and now ports. Aircraft just caught up: the whole subject graph for planes is now browsable.
Four kinds of pages
- Airframe —
/aircraft/{hex}: one specific tail, identified by its
ICAO24 transponder code. Registration, type, operator, and the spotter history: who caught this exact aircraft, who was first.
- Type —
/aircraft-type/{code}: the model itself — specs like typical
seats, engine type and range, its manufacturer, and everyone who has caught one.
- Manufacturer —
/manufacturer/{name}: every type the maker builds,
each one a link, plus the combined spotting stats.
- Airline —
/airline/{icao}: the operator — ICAO/IATA codes, radio
callsign, home country, and how many of its liveries have been spotted.
Each page carries its own holographic card, same visual language as your collection: the type card even inherits the rarity tier of the aircraft type, so a mythical airframe's page looks the part.
How pages fill up
Everything starts from a Sky Radar catch. Scan the sky over your head on the map, catch a blip, and that airframe's page comes alive — and its type, manufacturer and airline pages each gain a catch, a spotter and possibly a world-first credit. The capture card now links straight through: tap the aircraft's name on the card to open its page, or hit ☆ to keep it in your hangar.
The reverse direction works too: a page nobody has caught yet shows its reference data honestly and invites you to be the first — the earliest catch on any subject is recorded permanently as its first spotter.
The indexing rule, stated plainly
We deliberately do not throw thousands of empty reference pages at search engines. A subject page becomes indexable — and enters the sitemap — only once at least one real catch exists on it. The sitemap reads the exact same rule the pages serve, so a page can never be advertised while marked noindex. As the community catches more aircraft, the public encyclopedia grows one real observation at a time — the same discipline that governs vessel, shipyard, flag and port pages.
One honest note on scope: you won't see live aircraft flying around the simulator world itself. Unlike marine AIS, which streams to us at a fixed cost, every aircraft position is a metered API request — continuously rendering the sky for every pilot would burn through the data budget with nothing gained over the radar loop. Scan-on-action is the model: your scans are real, your catches are real, and every catch builds a page.