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What’s in a sighting?

by | Jul 18, 2024 | Database, Online Logging, Spotting

Logging aircraft.

When it comes to your spotting log, it is all about personal choice or preference. Two plane spotters at the same airfield on the same day will obviously log all the same stuff, so far so good. But it is possible that, even though the sigtings may be logged in an identical manner on the day. When they are transferred to some kind of master log, they could be kept in an entirely different manner – there may even be completely different information stored.

Our two ficticious spotters, lets call them Fred and Joe might have different perspectives on the information that they want to record. As an example Fred may have seen the aircraft before, for Joe it may be a new frame. If the registration or the owner of the aircraft has changed, for Fred it may be a “paint scrape” for Joe it’s still a first sighting of that particular aircraft.

Fred may record additional information, for example “Brought the Barcelona Team to the Cup Final”. Joe on the other hand may just record it as a “Football Charter”, or he might add nothing to the log entry. So the entries that you create in your log on the day make a difference to the information further down the line if you want to do any kind of research or writing.

What do I record?

Typically I’d try for a photograph with the registration of serial number visible and sort it out later, I don’t tend to keep additional notes – unless it’s something out of the ordinary. For stuff that’s flying and is too far away for an image, Flight Radar and ADSB Global are your friend (which is why I have a Bee in my Bonnet over LADD and PIA), at the moment you can get most of the information that you need from these sources – with the caveat that LADD hides departure and arrival airports on Flight Radar and PIA hides everything on both Flight Radar and ADSB Global – inside US Air Space.

In my log, I generally record the basic information that I provide for down load on the site. What I add is a date, a location and whether it was the first time that I saw the air frame. I seldom add any notes other than a photograph ID so that I can reference the photograph instead of searching through the 50,000 or so digital images that I now have.

What should you record?

In my opinion, if you’re just starting out – everything that you can. As you become more experienced and refine your skills as a spotter, you’ll recognise what you need to record to give you what you want from the hobby.

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.

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

Testing a bigger Log

by | Jun 17, 2022 | Airport News, Database, Spotting, Spotting Locations

So again some testing of a log file, this one is for Prestwick, for January and February 2021. This doesn’t include based stuff, that would make the file pretty large and to be honest a registration search would return 365 hits – so not practical.

The data has been sourced from a number of places, it is somewhat limited and would be the type of data that a spotter with a radio and a pen and notebook would typically collect on a visit to the Airport – so does kind of reflect a personal log.

 

Putting the data together was a little time consuming, however I will automate that as much as I can and should be able to speed the process up significantly. The sample data set was created manually, so there may be some typo’s in it – anyway here is the first largeish table with a little guidance as well.

The table can be sorted on a column, by clicking on the heading – obviously the usual constraints apply for date formats. You can sort by date, but the first of January will be followed by the first of February – so please bear that in mind.

There is a free text search, this will return matching values as a guide – searching for “135” will return all matching rows and as an example 12-135(Serial), KC135(Model), AFR1135(Callsign) and ERJ135(Model) would all be returned. It is possible to combine search terms, these should be separated by a space as an example “Boeing 747” without the quote marks.

Prestwick Log January and February 2021