
Show HN: What's My Aircraft? - ediardo
https://whatsmyaircraft.com/
======
mitchellst
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.

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

~~~
stackola
Not since it's been effectively grounded worldwide

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

~~~
ediardo
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

~~~
samstave
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...

------
benalbrecht
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](https://flightaware.com/live/flight/DLH1)

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

I'll fix it.

~~~
chx
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.

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

------
NationOfJoe
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.

~~~
ediardo
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.

------
eternalny1
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.

~~~
eternalny1
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.

~~~
heisenbit
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.

~~~
ams6110
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.

~~~
billforsternz
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.

------
bradknowles
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.

~~~
ams6110
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.

~~~
londons_explore
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.

------
korethr
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.

~~~
outworlder
> 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.

~~~
FearNotDaniel
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.

~~~
dingaling
And usually they aren't on the tail!

'Registration' is more accurate and is understood globally.

------
disposedtrolley
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.

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

------
pierrec
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.

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

E.G.
[https://whatsmyaircraft.com/#UAL123](https://whatsmyaircraft.com/#UAL123) \--
would immediately load the data for UAL123.

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

------
ngoel36
seatguru.com has provided this for a while, with seat-level detail

~~~
tjbiddle
Your point? Sometimes people just want to build things.

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

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

 _Tail numbers_ are unique; _flight_ numbers are not.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
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.

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

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

------
johnbatch
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.

~~~
ediardo
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

------
FearNotDaniel
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 :-)

~~~
kenneth
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.

------
marc3842h
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.

~~~
ediardo
Now accepting Flight # of length > 1

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

~~~
ediardo
I just added AXM to the list.

~~~
miguelrochefort
Great!

------
0xfaded
1978 Grumman Tiger

------
dpedu
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.

~~~
jen729w
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).

~~~
perilunar
try Qantas 001 or 002

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

~~~
ediardo
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...](https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/blob/master/data/airlines.dat)

------
roryrjb
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.

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

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

------
anamexis
Pretty cool. Where do you get the data?

~~~
ediardo
Hi, Thanks!

Data is coming from the FlightAware API.

~~~
d0ugie
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...

------
happppy
which API you are using?

~~~
ediardo
The Flightaware API.

I tried other services, including: \- [https://aviation-edge.com/premium-
api/](https://aviation-edge.com/premium-api/) \-
[https://developer.flightstats.com/](https://developer.flightstats.com/)

------
gregjor
seatguru.com

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

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

~~~
samstave
...today...

but in the future.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737#737_Next_Generation_\(737-600/-700/-800/-900\)_aircraft)
(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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Airbus_A320_family)
(Yes, it's much shorter, but the A320 series is a twenty year newer line.)

