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Comment by kenneth | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

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.

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.

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