The Directory: every aircraft and ship Skydex knows, in one place
Someone on the team tried to find one aircraft by its type last week and gave up on our own menus. In the end they searched Google for a page on our site. The pages existed. Getting to them was the problem: six separate hub pages, each with its own entry in the More menu, none of them with a filter, and no list at all of the individual aircraft and ships people have caught. If you knew a registration like D-AIZC, the only way to its page was a search engine.
The Directory fixes the getting there. It is one front page with two lanes, Aircraft and Ships, and every list behind it shares the same frame: a lane switch at the top, the sections as tabs, a filter box and a sort.
What is in it
Aircraft
- Types now lists every type designator our receivers have heard, plus every type a player has caught. Filter by builder, by class (wide-body, narrow-body, regional jet, business jet, turboprop, helicopter, piston), by engine count and by rarity. The default sort is how often the network hears a type. Codes we have heard but have no reference entry for yet are listed separately, without links, because there is no page behind them to open.
- Manufacturers and Airlines can be searched and sorted. Each count links straight to a filtered list: the number next to an airline opens the airframes of that airline.
- Airframes is new. It lists every individual aircraft somebody has caught, with registration, type, operator and photo. Filter by type, airline or rarity.
Ships
- Vessels is new too: every ship somebody has caught, with flag, category, length and builder.
- Flag states, Shipyards and Ports get the same filter and sort, and their counts link into the vessel list.
Links you can send
Filters live in the address. If you narrow the types down to helicopters built by one company, the URL says so, and the person you send it to sees the same list. An unfiltered list keeps its plain address.
What stays the same
The old addresses work exactly as before. /aircraft-types, /airlines and the rest are now sections of the Directory, with the same pages and the same links in the footer. The More menu got shorter: one Directory row replaces six.
The Directory lists what has been caught. It does not list aircraft the network heard but nobody caught, for the same reason a type page never prints a list of tails: a list of individual aircraft with dates is a way to track a person.
Next
Search comes later. A single box that finds a registration, a callsign, an MMSI or a type name across both lanes is the next phase, once these lists have settled. After that, the same box in the site header.