37 ms·
Show HN: What's My Aircraft?
- anamexis 8y agoPretty cool. Where do you get the data?
- ediardo 8y agoHi, Thanks! Data is coming from the FlightAware API.
- d0ugie 8y agoI 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...
- vincentmarle 8y agoThis is great to avoid all flights with Boeing 737 MAX.
- outworlder 8y agoWhy? They are all grounded.
- Latteland 8y agoWell, 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.
- korethr 8y agoSince the 737 MAX has been grounded, I don't think that needs to be a consideration.
- samstave 8y ago...today... but in the future.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoIn 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_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737#737_Next_Generation_(737-600/-700/-800/-900)_aircraft 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_incidents_involving_the_Airbus_A320_family 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.)
- objektif 8y agoDoes not matter people will still want to avoid 737 Max8. You should just respect that and move on.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoBut the reality is, particularly once these issues are addressed, the 737 MAX 8 is arguably the safer aircraft. While I recognize that people will base their actions on recent media rather than logic, we as the tech community shouldn't be helping them make bad decisions.
- korethr 8y agoNice. 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 8y ago> 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.
- korethr 8y agoFair enough. Spending most of my time in the US, 'November' is what I reflexively reach for.
- FearNotDaniel 8y agoEven 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 8y agoAnd usually they aren't on the tail! 'Registration' is more accurate and is understood globally.
- sokoloff 8y agoFor that use case, why not just look at the seat back pocket safety instructions that will have the model?
- bronson 8y agoOr 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 https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=755373 )
- relham 8y agoThis is great. An idea: make the aircraft names link to corresponding wikipedia pages or other sources of info on the specific planes.
- ediardo 8y agoThat'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 8y agoIf 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...
- kenneth 8y agoSeatGuru Link to this plane + airline combo would be the most useful.
- davidcollantes 8y agoWhy is there a need to pick an airline? Fight numbers, that I know of, are unique.
- sokoloff 8y agoThey’re not. DL (Delta) has a 2180 as does WN (Southwest). Tail numbers are unique; flight numbers are not.
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoI 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 8y agoYes, that is what I meant. For example, EK202 is unique to Emirates. Even if they change the airplane, the flight number remains constant.
- kenneth 8y agoEK202 is just short hand for Emirates flight 202. EK is the IATA code for the airline, and 202 is the flight number.
- ediardo 8y agoWhen I was developing this I noticed Southwest uses the same Flight # for a many different routes.
- isostatic 8y ago> 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/The-Science-behind-Flight-Numbers/ba-p/42760 https://www.southwestaircommunity.com/t5/Southwest-Stories/T... Looks like that specific flight number is no longer a multi segment.
- 0xfaded 8y ago1978 Grumman Tiger
- benalbrecht 8y agoNice! 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 8y agoThank you for reporting this. I didn't know there were Flight # that short! I'll fix it.
- andrewmunsell 8y agoSame with some Hawaiian Airlines flights :)
- meow81 8y agoreturns an error on some air canada flights. 8032 doesn't work
- chx 8y agoWhen 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 8y agoThat is one of the most engrossing Wikipedia entries I've read; thank you!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ediardo 8y agoNow accepting Flight # of length > 1
- bradknowles 8y agoIt'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 8y agoThey 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 8y agoShort 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.
- NationOfJoe 8y agoVirgin 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.
- ngoel36 8y agoseatguru.com has provided this for a while, with seat-level detail
- tjbiddle 8y agoYour point? Sometimes people just want to build things.
- miguelrochefort 8y agoI'm currently at the airport waiting for my flight. Unfortunately Air Asia is not in the list.
- ediardo 8y agooops... I'll make sure to add it asap. Thanks for letting me know!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ediardo 8y agoI just added AXM to the list.
- miguelrochefort 8y agoGreat!
- mitchellst 8y agoThis 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.
- ams6110 8y agoMost of that info is in Wikipedia, which has detailed pages on probably every aircraft type and model ever flown.
- cco 8y agoIsn't this just a tool to know if you were going to be on a 737 Max?
- stackola 8y agoNot since it's been effectively grounded worldwide
- taneq 8y agoYou 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
- ediardo 8y agoThe curious kid (and geek) inside of me would love to see this happening. Thanks a lot for the feedback!
- FearNotDaniel 8y agoHi 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 8y agoAs 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.
- pierrec 8y agoI 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.
- eternalny1 8y agoCertified 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 8y agoAll 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 8y agoRoughly 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.
- isostatic 8y agoHowever 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/9482126/Air-France-asks-passengers-for-whip-round-to-pay-for-fuel-after-emergency-stop-in-Damascus.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/...
- ams6110 8y agoNot 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.
- 8y ago
- disposedtrolley 8y agoThis 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 8y agoCheck out flightmemory.com. It isn't automated, but it does have a thriving community around saving and analyzing the information you mentioned.
- marc3842h 8y agoNice 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 8y agoNow accepting Flight # of length > 1
- isostatic 8y agoWhy 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 8y agoI think you need the date of the flight as well?
- sexyflanders 8y agoCool idea. FYI I couldn't find jetblue in the list.
- ediardo 8y agoThanks. I've added JetBlue Air (JBU) to the list.
- dpedu 8y agoI'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.
- johnbatch 8y agoInteresting 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 8y agoThis 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
- markdown 8y agoThere are only a handful of airlines on here. Where are the rest?
- ediardo 8y agoI 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/airlines.dat https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/blob/master/data/air...
- gregjor 8y agoseatguru.com
- happppy 8y agowhich API you are using?
- ediardo 8y agoThe 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/
- roryrjb 8y agoMinor 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.