Show HN: What's My Aircraft? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: What's My Aircraft?

whatsmyaircraft.com

73 pointsediardo86 comments

This is kind of cool but there are other good tools for it, as commenters mentioned. (Seatguru, FlightAware.) I think the missing feature there is simplicity and “so what?” Tell me why my a321neo is so cool, how to tell it apart from other planes when I see it on the tarmac, when it was designed, how many are out there, which airlines operate lots of them. Others will beat you on feature richness, but I just want an app I can use to teach my kids about planes, and geek out on them myself.

Most of that info is in Wikipedia, which has detailed pages on probably every aircraft type and model ever flown.

Isn't this just a tool to know if you were going to be on a 737 Max?

Not since it's been effectively grounded worldwide

You could use it to figure out which seats are emergency row seats. Some flight check-in pages don't display the emergency exits when choosing your seats, and it can make the difference between being able to use your 17" laptop or not. :P

The curious kid (and geek) inside of me would love to see this happening. Thanks a lot for the feedback!

This is great. An idea: make the aircraft names link to corresponding wikipedia pages or other sources of info on the specific planes.

That'd be awesome. BTW, some flight tracking services do show detailed information about the airplane, like service time (age), etc... I might give it a try

If you know the flight number and name of airline and aircraft make -- do you also get the Aircraft (ID?) -- such that you can see ALL the routes . this plane has flown over the last N period and know how many flight hours and miles it has under its belt for some period?

You could then calc the downtime that the planes get for maint/cleaning/etc...

SeatGuru Link to this plane + airline combo would be the most useful.

Nice! Found one small issue: I can't search for a flight number with less than three digits. Example: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/DLH1

Thank you for reporting this. I didn't know there were Flight # that short!

I'll fix it.

Same with some Hawaiian Airlines flights :)

returns an error on some air canada flights. 8032 doesn't work

When talking of short flight numbers, Speedbird 9 is what jumped to mind ... at least for me.

> Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.

British Airways Flight 9, from London Heathrow to Auckland, 24 June 1982.

That is one of the most engrossing Wikipedia entries I've read; thank you!

Now accepting Flight # of length > 1

Virgin Australia is not on the list, i assume they dont make that info available?

I dont really know flight numbers off the top of my head[1], it might be helpful to add a top 10 searches or pick of the day type feature. Some way to see something without knowing specific information.

[1] i can't be bothered to google flight numbers, but i will spend 10x the time writing this comment.

Thanks for letting me know. I'll add it to the list.

Yes, the app is only useful when you have the flight number at hand.

Just added VOZ to the airlines list.

Certified commercial pilot speaking here and I assume this comes out of the 737-MAX issue.

Obviously, you're ridiculously safe on any given airplane. Even as someone in the industry I can't believe the safety numbers myself at times.

All you need to think about is how many flights were flown around our planet last night alone.

Around 100,000.

You'll be ok.

Roughly 300 737max. Roughly a year in operation. Roughly 100.000 airplane days. Two accidents. The 737max has a safety record that is equal to two accidents per day in global air traffic. Or 700 crashes per year. With roughly 150 seat filled roughly a 100000 dead per year. There is a reason she is grounded and people are concerned.

However that's a specific type of plane that may have crashed for unrelated but improbable reasons.

In geenral flying on a scheduled airline is immensely safe. A 777 is no safer or no less safe than an A340.

Unless you fly air france and they decide to divert to Damascus in the middle of a civil war and have a whip round to pay the fuel bill [0], in which case the solution is Don't Fly Air France.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/...

Not saying it's the case here but randomness is clumpy not uniform.

Also new models unfortunately sometimes have problems. They'll get it sorted out.

Yeah this was anything but random.

I suppose flying a recently introduced plane is a bit like being operated on by a young and inexperienced surgeon. Someone's got to do it or else the plane will never get a billion hours of service history / the surgeon will never be 45 years old with 15 years plus of experience and steady hands and sharp eyes.

For comparison, the fatality rate for motor traffic in the US was 8.25 deaths per billion passenger-miles in 2016 ([0], [1], my calculation). There were 7.1 trillion passenger-km of global passenger air traffic flown in 2016 [2]. 100,000 deaths (your estimate) in 7.1 trillion passenger-km is equivalent to 22.6 deaths per billion passenger-miles (my calculation).

In other words, if all global passenger flights were on 737 max planes and the fatality rate continued, flying would be a little under 3x as deadly as driving on US roads on a per-passenger-mile basis, based on your estimate.

[0] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles

[1] (PDF) https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[2] https://www.icao.int/annual-report-2016/Pages/the-world-of-a...

You're right, but then again they are all grounded.

So website to check what model you are flying (apparently what this about) won't show you you are flying on a 737-MAX.

Aviation has a strong safety culture, and this plane won't be flying again until every aspect of what is going on is thoroughly looked into.

Boeing is in a big mess but safety comes first.

It's good to know that you pick up different aircraft types for the same flight on different days in the recent past or the near future. For certain flights, they might usually be on an Airbus A-320, but sometimes they might be on a Boeing 737-800 or 737-900.

However, I'd like to see the option of choosing a date or date range, if that was possible. I might want to go back further than just one or two weeks, for example.

They might also change with very short notice, I would think? In case of a delayed inbound flight, or mechanical problems with the scheduled aircraft that require substituting a different plane.

Short notice type changes are rare - as well as needing different pilots, the seating layout is different (requiring a re-issue of all boarding passes), and cargo restrictions and capacity is different so all the cargo would need reassigning.

Nice. This is certainly handier than trying to catch a glimpse of the tail number before boarding and then navigate the FAA's registry website on my phone. I suspect many people don't even know the significance of that big number starting with N on the tails of most aircraft. However, I'd wager that most people boarding a plane know their flight number and the name of their carrier.

> I suspect many people don't even know the significance of that big number starting with N on the tails of most aircraft

'November' is US-Centric.

Fair enough. Spending most of my time in the US, 'November' is what I reflexively reach for.

Even the assumption that it's a letter followed by numbers is US-centric... for most European countries at least, the tail 'number' is actually all letters; and there are many countries whose identifying prefixes contain a number.

And usually they aren't on the tail!

'Registration' is more accurate and is understood globally.

For that use case, why not just look at the seat back pocket safety instructions that will have the model?

Or look at the plate in the L1 door frame as you enter the aircraft.

(for many airliners: https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=755373 )

This is really cool! It'd be nice to be able to maintain a logbook of the different aircraft I've flown on, maybe grabbing the tail numbers of the planes as well if possible?

On top of that, some airlines like Qantas name their planes (e.g. you'll have an A330 named Cradle Mountain). I'm not sure that the mappings are publicly available but maybe it can be crowdsourced.

Check out flightmemory.com. It isn't automated, but it does have a thriving community around saving and analyzing the information you mentioned.

I like it.

Yes, other sites have been providing this, but I think this stands a chance of ranking well in the future when people search for what their aircraft is, and with good reason: it does that one thing without distraction. Especially on tiny phone screens, minimalism is a huge feature. Bonus points for reacting quickly to a media hype.

Why not allow a hash location to be passed, and update it when you do a search?

E.G. https://whatsmyaircraft.com/#UAL123 -- would immediately load the data for UAL123.

I think you need the date of the flight as well?

seatguru.com has provided this for a while, with seat-level detail

Your point? Sometimes people just want to build things.

Why is there a need to pick an airline? Fight numbers, that I know of, are unique.

They’re not. DL (Delta) has a 2180 as does WN (Southwest).

Tail numbers are unique; flight numbers are not.

I think they meant "flight number including two-letter prefix". But even those get reused from week to week (even day to day?) so might be different models.

Yes, that is what I meant. For example, EK202 is unique to Emirates. Even if they change the airplane, the flight number remains constant.

EK202 is just short hand for Emirates flight 202. EK is the IATA code for the airline, and 202 is the flight number.

When I was developing this I noticed Southwest uses the same Flight # for a many different routes.

> But even those get reused from week to week (even day to day?)

It's quite normal, especially in the US

> United 1644 operates BDL-IAD-IAH-MCO, yet BDL-IAD operates as a 737-800, IAD-IAH operates as a 757-200, and IAH-MCO flies with a 757-300.

https://www.southwestaircommunity.com/t5/Southwest-Stories/T...

Looks like that specific flight number is no longer a multi segment.

Interesting the flight number I’m on next week is wrong. I guess you need a way to change the date.

United.com says UA 2190 is a Boeing 737-900.

Right now UA 2190 is from Chicago to Palm Springs.

Next week it’s from Houston to San Antonio.

This could be the case where the airline reuses the same flight number for different routes. AFAIK Southwest does this a lot.

The schedule you see is originally created by the airlines with some days in advance

Hi Eddie - well done putting this together, it works really smoothly. I'm going to assume this is a fun project just for learning or to show off your skills, rather than something you're hoping to grow up to serious scale or even monetize. The reason I say that is, speaking as a frequent flyer, this is not something I would categorize under the YC mantra of 'build something people need'. True, the choice of aircraft is important to me, but Google Flights tells me that information when I'm searching for tickets, before I've even booked. It's true, as someone else noted below, that sometimes the same airline/flight number on different days will be flown with different equipment. And speaking as someone with a strong preference for Airbus over Boeing that matters when an airline like Cathay Pacific (one of the airlines you're missing, btw) will fly a B777 one day and an A350 on another day between Hong Kong and Melbourne (for example). If it's a holiday, where the exact day doesn't matter, then yes I am one of those people who might pick a different date because I prefer that kind of aircraft.

But even if Google didn't tell me that immediately before booking, I wouldn't be able to get it from FlightAware data (via your site or otherwise) because airlines don't seem to post it there more than a few days in advance. And besides, since I'm a plane geek I tend to look stuff up directly on FlightAware or FlightRadar24 all the time (I live right under the final approach to a very busy airport so I often go there just to see where the planes over my head have come from!), so I'm not sure what value you're adding by giving a tiny subset of the data that is available there for free anyway.

But still, as I said, I think it's great work if this is just for learning or demo purposes, well done. If you wanted to provide a bit of a usability improvement, I would second one of the comments below that suggests you shouldn't need to ask for the name of the airline if people supply the full flight number, i.e. with the letter prefix. That's the format that people will have on their tickets/booking emails etc, and it's actually a tiny cognitive load to mentally convert "OS264" into "Austrian Airlines" dropdown followed by "264" without the prefix; the clever part, for you of course, would be to convert the airline prefixes as used in ticketing and airport displays (OS, LH etc) to those that are used in the routing data (OS->AUA, LH->DLH etc).

Now if you could make an app that tells me exactly where to find free water refills at any airport after going through security, then I'd be happy :-)

As a frequent flyer, I appreciate the tool because it's surprisingly hard to tell exactly which model is being flown. Google will tell you it's a 737, but not which variant of 737. Many airlines don't break it down either. And

I have ExpertFlyer for that, but that's a paid subscription. Or I could fiddle with FlightAware's crappy UI. But having a neat tool that tells me immediately is cool.

As for why I care? Different planes often have different seats and in business class it can make a world of difference. Fly United's 777-300ER with the Polaris seats, or 777-200 with the "coffin seats" and you'll get a sense for why knowing the `-300ER` suffix makes a huge difference.

Nice site, really useful. I'd love if you were able to directly input smaller numbers e.g Emirates 88 instead of having to input Emirates 088.

Now accepting Flight # of length > 1

I'm currently at the airport waiting for my flight. Unfortunately Air Asia is not in the list.

oops... I'll make sure to add it asap. Thanks for letting me know!

I just added AXM to the list.

Great!

1978 Grumman Tiger

I'm not flying soon so I don't have a flight number to put in. I wish I could see your app! Maybe you could show a feed of random flights or the longest flights of the day or something like that that I can click on.

Just guess one! [Airline]1 is usually a flight. Is it usually the ‘flagship’ flight I wonder? I know Qantas is Sydney - London (and QF2 is the return).

try Qantas 001 or 002

There are only a handful of airlines on here. Where are the rest?

I just found this large dataset [1] of airlines on github. It contains more than 6k records, with their ICAO and IATA codes.

[1] - https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/blob/master/data/air...

Minor point but I'm seeing a lot of rectangles in a few places where presumably I don't have the right font to display the icon.

Cool idea. FYI I couldn't find jetblue in the list.

Thanks. I've added JetBlue Air (JBU) to the list.

Pretty cool. Where do you get the data?

Hi, Thanks!

Data is coming from the FlightAware API.

I feed ADSB data I collect with an antenna sticking out the attic window to FlightAware and a handful of others. Not sure why I do that, maybe the attic is an escape from my ol' lady, but I'm glad to learn it's going toward a good cause!

Speaking of grounding the 737 MAX, I should probably ground that antenna...

which API you are using?

The Flightaware API.

I tried other services, including: - https://aviation-edge.com/premium-api/ - https://developer.flightstats.com/

seatguru.com

This is great to avoid all flights with Boeing 737 MAX.

Why? They are all grounded.

Well, have the airlines owned up to what needs to be canceled? I'm flying in a week on a 737 something, I would hate for it to get canceled the day before, but if I saw it was scheduled for such an aircraft in the past, I could actively reschedule it myself.

Since the 737 MAX has been grounded, I don't think that needs to be a consideration.

...today...

but in the future.

In the future, the 737 MAX will only permitted to resume passenger flights once the safety issue on the plane has been fixed.

The 737 MAX is still likely to become one of the most common planes in the world for many years to come, as it's predecessors in the 737 line have been. If you are planning to permanently refuse to fly on the 737 MAX because of this incident, you may wish to be aware of the safety records of... well, every other plane:

Older 737s, well, the predecessors of the 737 MAX have had their share of losses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... (Scroll up from there to see how many losses took place on even older models as well.)

And if you're thinking Airbus is going to be your savior here, there's a pretty solid list here too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... (Yes, it's much shorter, but the A320 series is a twenty year newer line.)

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