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.