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How can I identify a PIA aircraft?

by | Nov 22, 2023 | Aviation News, Database, Online Logging, Optical Enhancement, Radio, Spotting, Spotting Locations, Spotting News

Well this is a bit of a conundrum, you see a plane look it up on one of the tracking sites and all there is is a ICAO code and a call sign. Everything else, registration, type, origin, destination and many other spotter friendly features are not displayed.

How then do you find out the actual identity of the aircraft and whatever other information that you like to collect?

Well the truth is you won’t get the information without some effort, it’s unlikely that you’ll find out the information without the help of other spotters. The only certain way of identifying these aircraft is a physical sighting, at either end of the flight – so if you can’t be at the airport when it lands then other spotter groups would probably be the place to start.

Typically a week day view of US air space will show thousands of aircraft, and the vast majority of these are readily identifiable using applications or web sites like flightradar24 or in this case globe.adsbexchange.com.

So in most cases looking up and seeing an aircraft, will if you know where you are – make the identification fairly straight forward, a quick look at the app or website and you have everything you need.

In the begining tracking flights was more technical, there were tools like ACARS – but you needed certain technical skills to use that to track aircraft. But along came flightradar24, this was an absolute boon to the spotters.

Lack of privacy was seen to be a problem, so along came the FAA’s LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) – which is a filter that the FAA puts in place for anyone taking a data feed from them – the image is LADD subscribed aircraft.

Just to be clear, these three screen shots were taken within a few minutes of each other the bottom shot is filtered by PIA subscribed aircraft.

As you can see, there aren’t that many aircraft in the view. But what I can say is that there is literally no information that would interest a spotter, the navigational information is there but little else is available.

In the next post I’ll go over the options and list some of the ways that you can try and find out the aircraft identity. But in the mean time consider this, both the LADD and the PIA services are free – so it’s likely that people using the LADD service will move to the PIA service.

Spotter Evolution – Notebook to Netbook.

by | Oct 29, 2022 | Application, Aviation News, Radio, Spotting, Spotting News

Since the beginning of Aircraft Spotting, whenever it was – things have moved on apace. As I’ve said elsewhere on the site, I started with a notebook and a pencil – while I was still at primary school. Now a pensioner, the hobby is still the same – but the goodies that assist have changed out of all recognition.

When I started spotting, the airport didn’t really have a fence and you could get close enough to identify the aircraft. Now you can see a contrail at 50 miles and identify the aircraft making it in just a few seconds, depending on conditions and location you can see contrails a lot further away than 50 miles. The advancing technology has changed the way that most people spot, I’ve seen us all trek out of the pub to stand and watch something go overhead on a clear night.

It used to be that there were a number of ways of finding information on arrivals and departures at an airport, there was many a time where you sneaked a look at the board that had the aircraft listed. Or you heard through the local spotters network, or you were just there at the right time.

Now you can identify an aircraft pretty much anywhere in the world, you can go further and show only aircraft that will arrive at a specific airport from the thousands in the air at any given moment. In an instant you can have all the information that you would need, information that you couldn’t get 20 years ago – when even if you could see the head of the trail and could identify the type finding out any more information was difficult.

 Now I have a second screen on my PC which has a permanent window on the aviation world, showing an area about 40 miles East and West of me and 25 miles North and South. It’s about as much as I can see given the obstructions around where I live, when I lived in Skye the settings were about twice that distance as I could walk up the hill behind the house which allowed me to see much further.

If I’m logging everything then I can generally log 100+ in a fairly ordinary day, I’m not really a civil spotter anymore – my focus moved to military many years ago. But it doesn’t mean that I’m no longer interested in civil aviation, just that it is a secondary interest now – there are exceptions I’ll make a trip to the airport to see something older and more interesting to me than the modern Boeings and Airbus that are now the mainstay of civil aviation.

Now I can see it a long way out and decide if I want to be there when it arrives, or if I want to just pop down and see it when it is in. All on my computer or phone, although I still write any details that I want to record in my notebook with a pencil or pen having gone up in the world.

 

Spotter Evolution – Beginning.

by | Oct 29, 2022 | Camera, Optical Enhancement, Radio, Spotting, Spotting News

A conversation with a fellow spotter raised a couple of questions about plane spotting, like when it started and why do people do it? The second is probably easier to answer than the first, as in – for the most part people enjoy watching aircraft and other aspects of the hobby. There are probably not that many spotters who have made their fortune from spotting, some have I’m sure but I’m also pretty sure that these people were spotters before they monetised their interest or hobby.

If you go looking for when Plane Spotting (Or probably more correctly) Aircraft Spotting actaully bagan, you can find numerous threads on the older aviation forums – these usually deteriorate into a bun fight during the course of the thread.

Mostly with references to spotters of other things, with Trains, Busses, Cars and even Birds all being denigrated by Aircraft Spotters. And yet I have met a number of Aircraft Spotters who collected information on some or all of the above, after all it is a hobby and as such pretty much on a par with any other hobby.

When did it all start is much more of a quandry, looking through the online archives of publications – the earliest mentions of the hobby that I can find seem to date from the very early 1950’s. Although other sources seem to date it from the 1940’s, however I’m aware of at least one spotter from the early 1930’s – so I’m guessing that it is still all open to confirmation.

A number of sources point to the formation of the Observer Corps as sowing the seeds of the hobby, with the pastime gaining traction after WWII. Although the Observer Corps can rightfully claim that it’s inception goes back to WWI, where the War Office used whatever resources that it could – these included both Army and Naval peronnel along with Special Constables, Lighthouse Keepers and even Boy Scouts to man observation posts and report aircraft movements.

The earliest log that I’m aware of is dated the 12th of December 1935, but I’m sure that it won’t be the earliest log that there is. Most peoples logs probably don’t survive them by long, only in a few instances will there be enough foresight to ensure that the collection of logs survives and goes to somewhere with the resource to hold the it.

The average person during the inter war years is unlikely to have had very much spare time or money to indulge in a hobby like aircraft or any other type of spotting, so at best these people may have stretched to a notebook and pencil – few would have had binoculars or a camera. However after WWII much changed, more free time and more disposable income would lead to more people with time to indulge in a hobby.

Along with the above came a veritable treasure trove of equipment availability, courtesy of Government Surplus – in the form of Binoculars, Radio Recievers and trained people admittedly mostly ex-forces but many turned their training towards their new hobby – Aircraft Spotting.