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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.

 

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

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.

Prestwick and the C17

by | Jul 11, 2022 | Airport News, Aviation News, Database, Online Logging, Spotting, Spotting Locations

Prestwick, long used as the jumping off point or arrival point for transports crossing the Pond. The main recognition started during the second world war, when it’s excellent fog free record was pointed out by Captain Duncan Macintosh. During the war years, there were huge numbers of Lend Lease aircraft transiting through Prestwick.

Still used as a stopover location for trans-atlantic traffic, now experiencing a revival for military traffic especially given the situation in Ukraine. It is unlikely to see the kinds of volumes of visitors it attracted in the 1960’s and 70’s, but there has been more traffic about that is obvious.

Conveniently placed, Prestwick has over the years seen it’s fair share of traffic – both East and West bound. The table below is the C17 traffic for the past few years and is an extract from my Prestwick historical log going back to 2016, there have been a lot through over that time. As to searching the table, by default any search string will be automatically search any field, however there is a drop down at the right side of the search box – this can be used to filter searches.

 

The C-17 at Prestwick

Smart Phone Spotting.

by | Jun 30, 2022 | Application, Camera, Equipment Reviews., Online Logging, Optical Enhancement, Software Reviews, Spotting

In this post, where I talk about a smartphone – you can substitue deviced like the iPhone, iPad or and Android tablet. Most people will have one of these devices that they can use, so lets get to what you can do with them in the spotting world.

The primary use for a smartphone is communication, but they are capable of so much more. Sit in a cafe or on public transport and you will see people using them to consume digital media in some format, or they will be creating content of some sort.

So how does this relate to plane spotting, well there are a number of ways of using such a device to assist if you have Mobile Data or WiFi access.. Using free App’s like flightradar24 gives access to aircraft ID’s on a continuos basis, an aircraft flying overhead can be in most cases positively identified and would allow you to capture quite a lot of information.

Typically this App will show things like the registration of the aircraft, owner or operator, flight origin and destination. There are a number of dynamic physical reports, altitude, course, speed along with elapsed time and remaining time for the flight. All available for free. There are a number of other Apps that do the same thing, the main difference between them all is the display – and again most of them can be downloaded free.

Recording Information.

As I’ve already said, a pencil and notebook is all that you need to get started. But with a smartphone there are many more options, simply download one of the free Apps, I use Google Keep this allows you to quickly add notes, voice memo’s, check lists and pictures – they are all kept in one App. This makes accessing the information very easy, but you should note that there are many Apps that have similar functionallity. As most of them are free to try I’d suggest that you try a few.

Using the Camera.

In general the cameras on these devices are good quality, I have used mine to take some very good shots over the years – but generally when I’m very close to the aircraft. The photograph above was taken on a smartphone camera, around six years ago. So if you can be within a few meters of an aircraft, the results will be more than adequate using your phone camera.

Some cameras come with multiple sensors and lens configuration, these provide optical zoom sometimes allowing you to zoom into your area of interest. I have found the digital zoom on a number of phone cameras to produce images that to me were not good enough, you may have more luck – experiment.

Addon Smartphone Lenses.

I have not experimented with the addon lenses for phone cameras , I actually still use a dedicated camera for my photography most of the time. But I have seen some excellent results, although in most cases a tripod was used – don’t let this deter you if you feel that that is the way to go.

Online Logs.

It is possible to log directly into some of the online logging apps, however a word of caution here – even the paid for sites tend to severely restrict what you can download from the site once you get home. But effectively you can use your smartphone to log directly into one of these, which does mean that you have your personal log available wherever you have mobile data or WiFi.

Anyway, Happy Spotting!

Prestwick – 2021 Log

by | Jun 28, 2022 | Airport News, Aviation News, Book Reviews, Online Logging, Spotting

So the testing of the tables and the search facility continues, this data set now comprises a full year of visitors to Prestwick. The based aircraft are not incorporated in the log, mainly due to the fact that each one would add 365 rows to the table – and a search would likely return 365 rows of data.

In order that the table is displayed properly it is at the bottom of the post, where it should be out the way of the rest of the post. The next test will be to break the year down into individual months, I’m going to experiment with various layouts and content to see what works best.

Some additional search and filtering tips, there is now a dropdown at the right hand side if the search bar. This allows the fields searched to be toggled on or off, this will allow more controlled searching and should make life a little easier.

It is possible to order the data by any of the column headings, simply click on the heading to order by alphanumeric ascending or decending – this will work on search results if required.

The data comes from a number of public sources, I have automated some of the data collection and hope to improve it over time.

Additionally I have started on the automation of the building of the logs but there is still some manual intervention required, it is still a manual proces to put it in the database – but eventually I may be able to automate some of the steps.

Visitor Log Prestwick (EGPK) 2021