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Digging Deeper.

by | Sep 5, 2022 | Spotting

In the previous post I covered some of the basics of finding a registration if what you have is partial or incomplete information. The information that wasn’t mentioned was just the date of the photograph, in this case it was the 12th of October 2011 and the location was San Carlos Airport CA.

To quickly update, a search of an age relevant database of my own, left me with almost 150 possible registrations ending with CP and on a Cirrus SR22 – which is just a few too many for ease of searching. Had this been a less common type or had more of the registration been visible, then identification would have been straight forward as I would probably had only three or four to search for manually – however 150 is a bit of a stretch.

What to do now.

As I described in the previous post, there are a couple of options for looking for this registration. The first is to contact the local spotters group if there is one, but this happened 11 years ago now so it may be that there are other options. Without trying too hard I was able to find a spotters group in the area, they are online here so I’ll start by asking them if they have a list for the approximate dates – or a residents list for the airfield.

Other Options

Other options here are some of the commercial database packages have residents lists, contacting other spotters that use packages like aerodata and the like may prove fruitful. But at the moment I’ll be waiting on feedback from the Bay Area Spotters, before I start contacting friends.

What is a Miss-pole?

by | Sep 5, 2022 | Database, Spotting

You may hear the term “Miss-Pole” in the spotting world, particularly in the Scottish spotting fraternity. It is much less common now as spotters do tend to rely on technology more than the Mk 1 eyeball, but if you’re visiting somewhere and reading the stuff off and logging yourself – particularly stuff that is on the ground. There is still scope to make mistakes, reading a D for an O or something similar – it can be worse with numbers.

This is a “Miss-Pole”, simply miss-reading a registration incorrectly or it being partially obscured. As I said above there are certain combinations that get confused, or something – like an other aircrafy is in the way. As you can see from the picture above, we have a Cirrus SR22 with just the last two letters of the registration visible.

Ask Around

It is very likely that someone else has been to the same place and may have a log, it is also likely that they will have logged the aircraft that you have the incorrect registration or serial for. A great resource for this type of help is Aviation For All, here you will find all kinds of people willing to help with that elusive identity.

Check Fleet Lists.

There are many sources on the internet and in aviation publications, these include fleet lists, blocks and batches – for US military Joe Baughers pages are hard to beat. But there are many other sources that can help, it is just about taking time to look.

Do it yourself data.

Not for everyone this, but as an example – I pretty well have a download of every version of the US Civil database from the FAA since 1992. This records every change to every aircraft, owner, engines, propellers, registration and many other aspects. I also have the Canadian, Australian and many other nations databases downloaded, however there are a number that are not downloadable in a usable format – but are handy for reference.

An Example

Below is an example from my test data set, this resides on my laptop so is necessarily small. In the example I was looking for registrations beginning N with one, two or three numbers and ending in CP, the search came back with almost 2,800 hits from an age appropriate data set. This obviously had to be filtered further, with the chosen criteria being Manufacturer – in this case Cirrus. This search returned only 562 records from the data set, but still nat to be refined further.

The nitty gritty

Adding further refinements brought this down to a paltry 149 air frames, where the registration ended in CP – clearly the DIY search of my own data was not good enough to narrow this down quickly. However I was down to just about 5% of the original search on registration alone, so we were moving in the right direction even if this was still nearly 150 aircraft.

The Potential Registrations - for a Cirrus SR22 ending in CP

Recording an Aircraft Identity.

by | Sep 2, 2022 | Equipment Reviews., Spotting, Trip Reports

As I’ve said before, logging sightings of aircraft is down to personal preferences. There are probably 50 or 60 things that you can log, but in reality only two of those don’t change during the life of an aircraft. The Manufacturer and the Construction Number also sometimes referred to as the MSN (Manufacturers Serial Number), every other aspect of the data you record can change.

In the UK, for the main part these changes are known as a paint scrape – usually signifying a change of ownership and colours. However they can encompass a number of other changes, like register or variant – but the manufacturer and serial don’t normally change. No doubt someone will point out the exceptions to this, there are I’m sure a few of them.

A Little Thought

So some thought at the begining of the process is worth while, there are a number of situations where going back and trying to fix a log that is missing information can be a problem. For instance, there are a number of manufacturers that use a small pool of registrations for delivery or pre-delivery testing purposes. So the underlying aircraft changes, bigger manufacturers like Airbus and Boeing occasionally do this as well – however the data is better recorded and can be easier to find.

There are a number of resources on the web that can assist in tracking this information down, but it can be a time consuming task when you have to go looking for the MSN, especially if it is years later – so this is something to bear in mind.

What do I Log?

I log all the normal stuff, usually adding the MSN to the mix. This usually comprises the date, location, registration, manufacturer, model and operator or owner. It may not be possible to collect all the data at the time, so usually the MSN and possibly the owner or operator are added later. I do have a number of databases that help with this.

A suitable log!

If like me you use a notebook and pen for your logging, then you can pare things down to the bare minimum. At it’s simplest you can simply keep a note of where, when, what and registration or serial – filling the rest in later. If you use some kind of technology, then whatever is your preference is the way to go – it just has to be fit for purpose.

Spotting in the garden.

by | Aug 31, 2022 | Spotting

So this morning was spent spotting from the garden, I would have carried on for longer but Cloud stopped play. The haul wasn’t too bad for just over four hours of spotting, with a grand total of 67 logged.

When all is said and done, this is actually not a bad log for a half day – especially as the bulk of the Transatlantic traffic was well South of my position. It was certainly better than I expected, given the current aviation climate.

What tools did I have, Pen, Notebook, Small Telescope and Camera – I could have used my binoculars had I not misslaid them.

A log from the back garden on the 31st August 2022.

The Prestwick Logs

by | Jul 15, 2022 | Database, Spotting

I have decided to move the Prestwick Logs to their own page, currently I have completed the 2021 visitors log and I am working on the 2022 logs. The plan is to display the logs on a concertina format, this will be monthly for the current year, annually for the previous five years then as a single log for the preceding years. I am open to suggestions on changing that though, so any feedback is welcome.

The data in the logs comes from a number of sites, with a reasonable degree of automation – although they still have to be manually checked and in some cases corrected. I’d like to go back as far as possible with the data, possibly making the whole archive searchable as a single data set. This is a kind of pet project that follows on from my own database, so I will probably just keep nibbling away at it when I can.