Your hangar keeps a passport

· aircraft · hangar · network

The hangar page has been growing all week. First every card learned to say when the network last heard that tail and how far back its history goes. Then the bell arrived: arm a favourite, and you get a notification when our receivers pick it up again after a few quiet days. Today two more sections join them, and both answer questions the fleet page has been answering about boats since the beginning.

The first is an airport passport. It lists the airports that flights of your tails have touched, one chip each, with the number of catches behind it and a line for the longest leg any of them flew. Tap a chip and you land on that airport's page.

One thing about it deserves saying plainly, because it is easy to misread. Those airports do not come from our receivers. They come from the timetable of the flight number a tail was wearing when somebody caught it. That is a schedule, not an observation. A rotation filed as Dallas to Fort Lauderdale and back counts its airports once, and a leg on the list is where the flight was booked to go, not proof that it arrived. Plenty of catches carry no timetable at all: business jets, private tails flying under their own registration, helicopters. The page prints that number rather than hiding it, so a short passport reads as "these tails fly unscheduled" instead of "something is broken".

The second section is a feed of recent sightings. One row per UTC day that one of your tails was heard by a Skydex receiver, newest first, with how many receivers caught it and roughly where. A row that follows a gap gets a bell icon and says how many quiet days it broke, using exactly the same rule the notification uses, so the feed and the bell can never disagree about what counts as coming back.

Days, not flights. A receiver cannot see where one flight ends and the next begins, and we are not going to guess. Coverage is patchy as well. A tail parked somewhere without a receiver nearby simply produces no rows, which says nothing about whether it flew. And when a refresh fails, the page keeps the last feed it read and tells you it is stale, because an empty list would be a claim about the sky that we did not measure.

Military airframes stay out of all of it. No movement history, no bell, no passport, no sightings, the same line the rest of the site holds.

None of this is public. The passport and the feed are yours, on your page, behind your login. Nothing new is published to anyone else.

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