Type the tail number
Adding an aircraft to your hangar used to start with a question nobody can answer from memory: what is its ICAO24 hex? Six hexadecimal digits, no dashes, no spaces. If you had just watched something interesting go over and written down the registration off its tail, the box could not help you. You had to go somewhere else, look the hex up, come back and paste it in.
The fleet has never worked that way. Its add box searches live traffic by name, MMSI or callsign, and you star what you recognise. As of today the hangar does the same thing, over our own receivers' sky.
Type at least two characters and the box searches every aircraft the network is hearing right now. Registration comes first, because a tail number names that specific airframe rather than today's flight: type D-AIBL or daibl and you get one result. A flight number works too (DLH441), as does an operator name (Lufthansa), a type designator (A35K) and the hex itself, if you happen to know it. Each hit shows what we can tell you about the aircraft before you commit: registration, model, operator, and whether it is airborne and at what flight level or sitting on the ground.
Star it and it lands in your hangar with its details already filled in, the same way a radar catch does.
A few things about that search are worth stating plainly.
It is free. It reads the same cached snapshot of our own ingest that the maps and the in-flight plate already poll, so it costs nothing to run and nothing to use. Nothing on this path can reach the paid source. That remains true of the whole hangar since last week's change: the only thing that still spends a daily slot is asking for a tail the network cannot hear, and that button appears only for those aircraft.
It cannot find a private aircraft. Private tails are anonymised upstream, before any of this code sees them, and what the search reads is the identified list. A private aircraft was never addable to a hangar anyway, because adding needs a hex and an anonymised contact does not carry one. The search keeps that line exactly where it was.
It only knows what is flying. An aircraft parked overnight, or out of our coverage, is not in the snapshot and will not appear, no matter how correctly you spell its registration. That is why the hex box is still there, underneath: it is the one door that works for an aircraft the network is not hearing, and a row added that way still gets its type filled in from the hex-to-type table our stations have been writing since the beginning of September.
Type a type code and you will often match more aircraft than fit on screen. Rather than quietly cutting the list at thirty and letting it read as "that is all we hear", the box tells you how many matched in total and suggests narrowing it. Four hundred and twelve 737-800s in the air is a real answer to a real question; it is just not a useful shortlist.
One last note on what the search deliberately does not do. Military aircraft stay searchable, because they are identified contacts and the map has always named them. What they never get is movement history or an alert, and that rule lives where those features do, not here.