Aircraft pages get real photographs
Every aircraft you catch on Skydex gets pages: the individual airframe with its spotting history, the type it belongs to, the airline, the manufacturer. Until today those pages were data plus our generated card art — clean, but abstract. An A320 page that never shows you an A320 is leaving the best part out.
Now they show the real thing, from two sources with two very different jobs.
The type gets its portrait
Type pages — /aircraft-type/b738 and friends — now open with a proper photograph of the aircraft type, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Commons images come with free licenses (Creative Commons or public domain), which is why you'll always see a small caption under the photo: the author's name linking to the original file, and the license it's published under. That caption is not decoration — it's the license working as intended, and it stays.
These portraits are curated in a semi-manual pass: a script walks our aircraft-type reference, finds each type's canonical image via Wikidata, and a human eyeballs the result before it's written — automatic name matching is good, but aviation is full of look-alikes and museum one-offs, and a wrong photo on a reference page is worse than none.
The tail gets its own photo
Airframe pages — the page of one specific aircraft, keyed by its ICAO24 transponder code — go a step further: they show a photograph of that exact tail, when one exists. These come from Planespotters.net, the community database the whole ADS-B world relies on; the same photos you see in every serious tracker. Each one is credited to its photographer with a link back to the original — tap the photo or the name and you land on their page.
Coverage is honest: commercial airliners are photographed constantly, so most tails you catch will have a shot; a light aircraft from a small field may not. When there's no tail photo the page falls back to the type portrait, and past that to our card art — never a broken image.
Photos are cached on our side and refreshed on a slow schedule, so pages stay fast and we stay polite to the source. If Planespotters ever has an outage, the cached photos keep serving.
The long game
The endgame source was always going to be you. The roadmap has real spotter photos — you photograph the aircraft you catch, and your shot becomes part of that airframe's page, credited to you. External photos fill the pages today; community photos take them over tomorrow. That's the same pattern our ship-spotting sightings already follow.
Until then: catch something rare, open its page, and see what it actually looks like.