I came accross this site some time ago, as a research resource it does tick a number of boxes. The objectives of the site are laudable, however given how precious many people are about their collections of pictures I think that they will fall short. Not due to ambition, but due to the attitude of collectors.
The stated ambitions is; “The aim of AirHistory.net is to create an archive that will ultimately hold photos of every aircraft ever built, in all its colour schemes and markings, in every configuration it ever flew, at every event or in every country they ever visited, and in every collection of preserved aircraft of which they were part.”, this is a significant challenge.
I have watched the site grow and have increasing numbers of images added, with a good support base. The whole image set now exceeds 350,000 images of around 160,000 frames, which is a good start. However the practicalities of this ambitios plan are stagering, lets take a worked example – of just a single aircraft.
So if we assume a fairly low resolution digital photograph or scan of a physical print, as being half a megabyte in size. It all doesn’t sound too bad at this point, this aircraft is likely to visit only a few locations a year – not that likely to be more than twenty. This gives us a nice clean 10 megabytes, however if we start adding markings changes and most aircraft go through a number of these – then over a fairly short period of time we have twenty or thirty megabytes of data.
But if we stick with 10 Mb for a frame (The same frame at 20 locations, without a paint or registration change.), taking the US Civil Register as is which is approximately 400,000 current frames and over 100,000 deregistered frames we arrive at a mere 5 Tb assuming a single colour scheme or registration for the life of the aircraft.
Here is an example of an aircraft life;
| N61981 | Douglas DC-3A | 2216 | R-1830-92 | 1940 | ||||
| rg 06/9/15 Christopher J Siderwicz Marstons Mills MA based KHYA | ||||||||
| N61981 | rg 10/02/2000 Kestrel Inc. Waukee IA | |||||||
| HR-AQI | ||||||||
| N144FS | ||||||||
| HC-BQZ | ||||||||
| N35PB | still in service 7/88 | PBA | ||||||
| N35PB | Provincetown-Boston Airline | |||||||
| N25685 | dd 3/59 – 4/65 | TTA Trans Texas Airways | ||||||
| N25685 | merged 8/52 | Braniff International | ||||||
| N25685 | MID-CONTINENT Airlines | |||||||
| N25685 | leased 6/43 – 10/44 | Braniff International | ||||||
| 42-56104 | dd 3/49 Douglas C-49E | US Army Air Forces USAAF | ||||||
| N25685 | dd 5/40 as Douglas DST-217B | 85 Flagship El Paso | American Airlines | |||||
| current | comm | |||||||
This frame has had 13 changes during its life and would probably generate 100 Mb of data on its own, if the images exist. Airlines change liveries fairly regularly, so I think that the data storage requirement would run possibly to 100’s of Terabytes.
There is also so much duplication of effort, the airframe above can be found here