Aircraft Make/Model Identification on Photos

[Doug Robertson]

This fine site is receiving many aircraft photos, especially of interesting foreign registered civil or military aircraft worldwide, that are much appreciated and could really add to the site's usefulness.

Many of these photos, however, do NOT identify the aircraft manufacturer or model just giving the tail registration. It would be most helpful for the submitting photographer to put this information in the photo captions, as a new Home page thus created is devoid of any other identification information. Emails to the photographers may go unanswered, and this limits the photo's usefulness. I don't find that all these photos can be identified by looking up the country registration identification alone in a web browser. The knowledgeable, responsible aircraft photographer should be the best source of this information. Hope I haven't opened a can of worms here.

Your thoughts?
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PP ASEL

[stantonite]

In principle , I am in agreement with what Doug is saying , but I would just need clarification to establish which , if any , Nationality registrations are added directly from the a Country's National Body.

For example , I have always assumed that new/re-registrations on the US , Canadian or UK Registers somehow get AUTOMATICALLY added to the database , as 99 %of the time the info seems to already be there - even for newer aircraft - the 1% of time the info is NOT there - I' am concerned that if I add the info it may disturb any subsequent AUTOMATIC update

Maybe the owners / moderator could first outline for us all exactly how the database is maintained

[Airport-Data]

Thanks to Doug to bring up the question.

US registry database is updated fully automatic on a weekly basis. The updates include current and de-registered aircraft. So in most cases it's not necessary to manually add a US tail number. Though it did happen that an aircraft disappeared from both de-registered and current database.

Canadian registry database is updated manually and irregularly by myself. Fully automated update is in my to-do list. The same rule on manually inserting US tail number applies to Canadian ones.

UK registry is a bit different. I can't download full UK registry database from internet, however I can check one aircraft at a time. I have found a relatively complete UK database somewhere on the internet before, and imported it into our database. If a visitor is search for a UK tail number that does NOT exist in our database, the program will automatically check with CAA (UK civil aviation) website for that number. If information is found, a new record will be added into our database. We can call it semi-automatic, because it's initiated by our visitors.

We use same method on Swiss (HB-) registry as UK.

Above information only applies to civil aviation. Military registry are fully manual and are contributed by our visitor for most part of it.

stantonite was right, we don't encourage visitors to add US, CA, UK or swiss aircraft manually, because there's a chance to disturb the consistency of our database. For example, if you search for a UK civil aircraft, and was presented with "Add new aircraft" page, that means we can't find it in our database, and can't find it in current UK registry, so there's a big chance that the aircraft registry number was typed wrong. If the visitor continues to add it without double check, a fake record may be created in our system.

Again, all above only applies on civil aviation.

Ken

[Doug Robertson]

Thank you Ken, for the explanation. I am certain it will be useful to many site users. My concern especially was to foreign military aircraft I could not identify by make or model that might be entered numerically only-such as 00-000 off the tail or fuselage. If one were to enter such a numeral combination into a web browser-hundreds of thousands or millions of matching combinations might come up leading to such diverse offshoots as a chapter and page referenced in a book, folio number, a serial number of a product or a stock number of most anything anywhere in the world.

I still would hope that photographers would make the effort to enter the make and model, and correctly of the aircraft photographed. And, if unknown-so state.

In flight at certain angles one Boeing 737-100 might look like a Boeing 737-300 or even -800, and who's to know? I have flown in most of the B-737 versions, and external differences among all the versions escape me. (Airliners are not my main interest). Many nations operate them, and probably all nations are not in the database.
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[Daniel Compton]

Good point.

Another problem on here and I am not throwing anyone specifically under the bus on this but when I went to post several of my American military pictures from a recent airshow, I noticed a couple other posters from this site were also at that show and posted the pictures and entered the 6 digit serial numbers but never entered the data.

I would enter the 6 digit number - got the no match found message, then I proceeded to enter the info and up pops about 2-3 different pictures of that aircraft that other posters put up.

This site is good for US Army and Air Force serials

http://home.att.net/~jbaugher/usafserials.html

and this is good for Navy/Marine bereau numbers

http://home.att.net/~jbaugher/navyserials.html

I am not sure what is a good site for military aircraft of other countries. I also have had some hard time getting International Civilian aircraft. I usually use this site for International civilian aircraft if this site doesn't have it already, but it is missing a lot too

http://www.landings.com/evird.acgi$pass*104027245!_h-www.landings.com/_landings/pages/search/reg-world.html

this site is good for US military tail two letter tail codes

http://www.globemaster.de/tailcodes.html

[Airport-Data]

Just found this site a few days ago. Very good resource on airliners.

http://www.airlinerlist.com

[Doug Robertson]

Thank you Ken, for your great and responsive support of your site. You are a role model website manager.
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PP ASEL