Heard by the network: type and aircraft pages now say where our receivers picked them up
Search Console showed us something small this week: people are typing bare type designators into Google (b772, pc24, c 152, piper pa-32) and our type pages appear in the results. Nobody clicked. That's fair. Until today those pages said what Wikipedia and Planespotters already say: seats, range, a photo. The one thing nobody else has is what our own antennas hear, and we were sitting on it.
What changed
Every aircraft type page and every airframe page now carries a block called Heard by the network. It's built from the feeder stations that stream ADS-B into Skydex, and it answers three questions the spec sheet can't:
- How many different airframes of this model the network has heard, and
how many sightings that adds up to. A sighting is one airframe on one UTC day at one receiver. It's deliberately not "flights": a receiver can't tell where one flight ends and the next begins, so we don't pretend to.
- Which stations heard it, each a link to its own station page, with the
station's country, the nearest city to its antenna, and the owner's handle where they chose to be credited.
- When: the first day the network knew the type, and the last day it was
heard. The type page prints "since 1 September 2026" on purpose. That's when we started recording which hex belongs to which type. Older packets exist, but their types were never written down, and we won't invent them backwards.
The same sentence goes into the page's meta description, in front of the specs. That's the line a search result shows, and "heard by three Skydex receivers, 267 airframes since 1 September" is a better reason to click than "180 seats, 6,300 km range".
Where, exactly
The place printed next to a station is the antenna's place, not the aircraft's. Our day records store which hexes a receiver heard, not where each aircraft was, and a good antenna hears out to 300 km. So the block says "heard near Hamburg", never "flew over Hamburg".
"Near Hamburg" is also as fine as it gets. The nearest city comes from the same list of about 1,250 world cities the map uses, so it's a point with tens of kilometres of error. Station pages promise that a receiver's exact location is never published, and this keeps that promise. The station page itself now prints the same "near" line, so a type page can never say more about a receiver than the receiver's own page does. A station whose owner entered no coordinates is named and not placed.
What is deliberately not there
Type pages carry counts, not tail numbers. Four of the five queries that started this were light general aviation, the kind of aircraft a private owner flies on Saturdays. A list of registrations with dates on a type page would be a log of somebody's weekends, and our privacy rules for private aircraft forbid exactly that. "Twelve airframes of this type heard near Hamburg" identifies nobody. Airframe pages are keyed by hex by definition, but they exist only for aircraft somebody has caught in the game, and private aircraft are never catchable, so nothing moves there either.
Sitemap side effect
The type and airframe entries in the sitemap now carry the last day the network heard them as their modification date. That's an honest date, since the page really does change on the day the network hears the type again, and it's the only kind of date search engines keep trusting. We didn't stamp every page with the time the server rendered it; that's the pattern that gets the whole field ignored.
If you feed the network, your station is now on every type page for every model it has heard. If you don't yet, the feeder landing explains how to start, and the station leaderboard shows who already does.