Aircraft type pages now say who flies them
Open the page for the Ilyushin Il-76 and, until today, you could not tell who flies one. The page had the specs, the receivers that heard it and a wall of caught airframes. The wall is where the airline used to live: every caught tail carries its operator on its card. Nobody had caught an Il-76 yet, so the wall was empty and the airlines with it. The network, meanwhile, had heard twenty different Il-76s in three weeks.
The gap was in what we kept. Our receivers hear every callsign, TSO123 or DLH441, but the table that remembers each airframe stored its type and the last time we heard it, and nothing about who was flying it.
What changed
Each minute, while an aircraft is overhead, we now also note the first three letters of its callsign. That is the airline's ICAO code: TSO is Aviastar-TU, DLH is Lufthansa. It is one short field on a row that already existed, so the database grows by about a megabyte across everything the network has ever heard.
The type page reads those codes back and prints an Operators list: airline, flag, link to its page, and how many distinct airframes of that type it has. Caught aircraft are merged in, so an airline shows up even for a tail our receivers never heard. One airframe is never counted twice.
What it does not say
- Military aircraft are counted, not named. An Il-76 flying for an air force shows up as "military" in the note under the list.
- Private aircraft are counted, not named. A private pilot's callsign is usually their registration, and we don't keep anything identifying for those.
- The operator is the latest one we heard. Aircraft get sold and leased. We keep the current operator, not a history of owners.
- It starts today. Callsigns weren't stored before 7 October, so airframes the network heard only before that land in "without an operator callsign yet". That number shrinks as they fly over a receiver again.
The list fills itself as the network hears more, and every receiver someone plugs in widens it. If an airline is missing or looks wrong, tell us in Discord.