Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeristor | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to select for the aircraft when booking a flight?

Price, flight times, and minimal number of connections are the main focus; but is there a website that can add in aircraft type?

I realise types can be swapped, but with historical data there should be very high probability of prediction of aircraft type at booking.

I flew a 757 back in the 1980s and have fond memories of it. This article made me realise that a spate of flying in 737s might have been what put me off flying for so long.

View on HN

Most airline websites and search engines will show you which type of aircraft a flight is on in the results. Alternatively, Google Flights or ITA Matrix can show you. You don't always get to find out easily which variant of an aircraft it is, e.g. a 757-200 vs. a 757-300 might both show as "757."

So there’s a gap in the market if you want to be able to filter by aircraft.

I can imagine adding another dimension for searching flights could have an impact on usability though.

Or it could be an opportunity for Airbus to publish a “Fly Airbus” website. I think they’ve already done it in the first years of the A380. That way the plane brand filter is embedded before even starting the search.

ITA Matrix is my favorite powerful flight search engine. It lets you filter by aircraft, among many other things. You have to learn what essentially amounts to a really obscure query language to use it effectively.

Google Flights uses ITA Matrix tech (bought by Google a few years ago) and it even gives you a link to buy tickets straight from the airline. Has pretty much the same usability features of ITA Matrix and none of the cruft of Orbitz et. al.; highly recommend it.

Some power user features of ITA aren't available on Google Flights still - for example, it lets you construct specific weird routings or layovers that Google will often optimize away. For instance, if you want a 24 hour layover in a city, or if you want to fly a less efficient direction to your destination to build mileage, or whatever.

You can use bookwithmatrix.com, though, which parses the output and will generate a ticket for booking on an online travel agency like Expedia.

Thanks for the recommendation! I hadn't heard of it bookwithmatrix.com.

I haven't seen a search filter for that but you could manually check the probable aircraft on SeatGuru once you find out the flight number from the airline's website.

and on https://whatsmyaircraft.com/

Some airlines only fly single types of plane (eg. Easyjet now only flies Airbus A32x) so that would be one way to choose the plane.

Airlines shuffle planes constantly to deal with changes in demand, maintenance, etc.

Even if you knew what plane they're planning on flying when you bought the ticket, the plane that rolls onto the gate might still end up being a different one.

Google Flights (and click through to the carrier’s site) has been pretty accurate for me. Only one time VA swapped a B787 for an A340 on my flight from LHR to JFK.

I asked the attendant and they explained that they were having some issues with the B787.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com