What the plate says now
Fly up to a real aircraft in the simulator and a small plate appears over it: the photo, the callsign, a line of numbers. Until today that line read something like C30J · 05-8156 and FL280 · 284 kt, and that was the whole story. If you knew that C30J is the ICAO designator for the Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules, and that 05-8156 is a US Air Force serial rather than a civil registration, the plate told you a lot. If you didn't, it told you a code.
That was a strange thing to be stingy about, because the network already knew more. Every receiver feeding the Skydex network runs a decoder that carries an aircraft database, and that database attaches a full description to almost every airframe it hears. We checked the live feed while writing this: 59 aircraft in view, 59 with a description. We had been reading the code and throwing the sentence away.
What changed
The plate now carries the model name as its own line: "Lockheed C-130J Hercules", "Boeing 737-800", "Airbus A320neo". Our own reference table is asked first, because its names have been checked designator by designator against the ICAO list; when the table has no row for a code, the feeder database's description fills in. The code itself stays on the line below, next to the registration, because that's what spotters actually write down and what the type pages are keyed by.
The operator's flag rides with the airline name, and stands alone next to the logo when the logo has taken the name's place in the title row. A military contact now says so in words. The 3D model was already tinted for military aircraft, but a tint with no caption is a fact nobody can read, and the map card had been saying "Class: military" for a month while the sky kept quiet.
Distance joined the altitude line. It was only ever on the far tag, the one-line label a contact wears beyond nine kilometres. Up close it's the number that answers "can I get there before it's gone", so it belongs where the rest of the numbers are.
And one line is allowed to shout. If an aircraft declares an emergency, or squawks one of the three codes every spotter knows, the plate paints a red line naming it. 7700 is a general emergency, 7600 a radio failure, 7500 the one nobody wants to see. These are rare, which is the point: the plate stays quiet until the one contact that matters.
The distant tag changed too, and more than we first planned. Beyond nine kilometres a contact wears a one-line label instead of the full plate, and that label used to be headed by the callsign. It's now headed by the model. On the horizon the question is "is that an A380 or a 737", not "what does ATC call it", and a dozen callsigns across the sky read as noise where a dozen model names read as traffic. The callsign moved into the line below, with the operator's flag in front of it and the altitude and distance after. The emergency line is on the far tag as well as the near plate, because a 7700 forty kilometres out is exactly the contact worth turning towards, and distance must never hide it.
The same facts appear on the map card when you tap or hover an aircraft: model with the designator in brackets, flag beside the airline, squawk, and the alert row when there is one.
What it is not
None of this is new data bought or scraped. It's the feed our own receivers already deliver, read a little more carefully, plus the reference tables we restored months ago. Where the aircraft is coming from and where it's going is still not on the plate. That data lives in route databases whose licence forbids copying it into ours, and the honest way to show it is a separate on-demand lookup with attribution. That design is still waiting for a decision, so it's not a missing line so much as an unanswered question.
The plate had to grow a little to make room. It's bottom-anchored, so on a contact with nothing to add it looks exactly as before.