Warning
Please only suggest/make any changes to the plane-alert-db.csv, plane-alert-pia.csv, plane-alert-ukraine.csv and plane_images.csv files on GitHub - all other files (except PIA) are generated from this file, and if you do not make your changes there, they will be overwritten and lost. Additionally, it is not recommended to edit the CSV files in Microsoft Excel, as Excel will attempt to "fix" some ICAO hexes and other fields. It's better to use a code editor such as VS Studio Code—you can access the web version of Code by pressing the period key . when viewing the file you wish to edit.
There currently are about 14320 unique aircraft in 51 categories found in this repository. This Dashboard contains details of the main list and the most recent additions.
These aircraft are divided into four main databases:
plane-alert-db.csv - A list of interesting aircraft with tags, categories and links. (14287)
A second version of each of the above lists contains up to 4 image links per aircraft. These lists are created in GitHub action using the plane_images.csv database. Please consider this experimental, do not come to rely on any of the image links
Note, we used to create a seperate list, plane-alert-twitter-blocked.csv, for use with Planefence's Twitter posting functionality. This list would prevent certain aircraft from being posted to Twitter in an attempt to keep the posting bot account from being banned. Since Twitter has now made it all but impossible for users to make bots for free, we've stopped creating this list.
Think of categories like groups, with similar or related aircraft listed together. This allows you to easily select a subset of the list for your own use. The category names (and tags) come from my rather idiosyncratic sense of humour. If you have better suggestions I'm all ears.
Category
Description
Count
Aerial Firefighter
Firefighting Aircraft
327
Aerobatic Teams
Red Arrows, Blue Angels, etc.
78
Army Air Corps
UK Army Air Corps, mainly Helicopters
94
As Seen on TV
Companies and Brands
417
Big Hello
Large Helicopters (sic)
104
Bizjets
Fancy pants planes for fancy pants people
43
CAP
Civil Air Patrol.
7
Climate Crisis
Oil Companies, Large Business Jets - BBJs and ACJs
192
Coastguard
Coastguard, Customs and Border Patrols
440
Da Comrade
Russian or Soviet Aircraft
91
Dictator Alert
People of potentially questionable morals and values
324
Distinctive
Unique and/or special aircraft e.g. The AN-225 Myria, NASA aircraft, Testbeds
187
Dogs with Jobs
Aircraft with specific roles and/or modifications
175
Don't you know who I am?
Famous People. I was going to say notable, but I'll go with Famous
65
Flying Doctors
Air Ambulance and Medical Flights
804
Football
Actual, Aussie Rules or American. We don't discriminate.
9
GAF
Aircraft of the German Air Force
407
Gas Bags
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
14
Governments
Aircraft registered to Governments
253
Gunship
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt
261
Hired Gun
Why do the dirty work when someone else can do it for you?
253
Historic
It's older than I am and most likely has a prop.
419
Jesus he Knows me
Aircraft owned and operated by religious organisations
21
Joe Cool
Cool Planes. Or at least I think they are cool.
210
Jump Johnny Jump
de Havilland Chipmunks. Air Cadets of a certain age will understand.
388
Nuclear
Nuclear Emergency Support Team etc.
16
Oligarch
I made this money all by myself.
41
Other Air Forces
Air Force aircraft that are not GAF, RAF, or USAF
2004
Other Navies
Navy Aircraft that are not Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm or United States Navy
199
Oxcart
Intelligence gathering aircraft
656
Perfectly Serviceable Aircraft
Why do you keep jumping out of a Perfectly Serviceable Aircraft aka Skydiving planes
44
PIA
Privacy ICAO Address....you can run, but you cannot hide.
15
Police Forces
Your friendly neighbourhood flying (insert local colloquialism here).
899
Ptolemy would be proud
Mapping and Aerial Survey aircraft.
146
Quango
NATO, United Nations, World Bank etc.
32
Radiohead
Very Very special aircraft. Think VC25.
5
RAF
Aircraft of the Royal Air Force
240
Royal Aircraft
Aircraft used or owned by the UK Royal Family
8
Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm
Aircraft of the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm
97
Special Forces
The best of the best of the best. Sir.
180
Toy Soldiers
Armies from around the world.
804
UAV
It's not natural, I tell 'ya!
33
UK National Police Air Service
Your friendly neighbourhood flying bobby.
24
United States Marine Corps
Aircraft of the United States Marine Corps, Oorah!
219
United States Navy
United States Naval avaitors. Some say they are the best of the best.
392
USAF
Aircraft of the United States Air Force
2269
Vanity Plate
Distinctive registrations
74
Watch Me Fly
Flying and Training Schools
75
You came here in that thing?
Microlights, tiny planes and helis..think Yakima Super Breezy.
Note
The priority of use is first-to-last, so if you want your local list to be interpreted first, move it to the front of the list.
Add these characters to the column headers to control the behaviour of PlaneAlert
$ - Tweet this column as #hashtag.
# - Don't show on the website (it will ignore this for the ICAO field, which is always shown).
$# - Don't show on the website; tweet as a #hashtag.
Contributing
Feel free to open an issue if you have ideas on improving this repository or want to report a bug! All contributions are welcome 🚀. Please consult the contribution guidelines for more information. You can also check out the TODOS page if you want to contribute to this repository but need some ideas.
Warning
As also explained above, this repository contains four main databases to which people can contribute. The other databases are created automatically using GitHub action. As a result, please only suggest/make any changes to these main databases. Changes made to all other CSV files will be overwritten and lost. Additionally, it is not recommended to edit the CSV files in Microsoft Excel, as Excel will attempt to "fix" some ICAO hexes and other fields. It's better to use a code editor such as VS Studio Code—you can access the web version of Code by pressing the period key . when viewing the file you wish to edit.
If you're creating a pull request with additions, please add them to the end of the file. We may sort the list periodically to group like planes together.
Disclaimer, excuses and dodges
This is not intended to be a definitive list, especially when it comes to aircraft models. Where the same model of aircraft is made by several manufacturers I won't always have the correct one. If you thought it was a Beechcraft King Air 200 and actually it was a Textron Super King Air B200GT, I won't be losing any sleep. There are other data sources (see below) if you want absolute accuracy.
Data Sources
This data has been gathered from far too many sources to mention, but some sites have been really useful:
Hi. Please can you change G-CIOS 406B1E from Cornwall Air Ambulance to Specialist Aviation Services. It is no longer op for Cornwall Air Ambulance. Ta. R
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Well this is a current list I believe of all of the ICAO which are in RadarAtlas but not in this database. It's semi-automatically done as it's a libreoffice (in this column but not that one) but I checked a few and they don't appear to be in this database. Of course they could be old or outdated. But since it's here, here goes:
Well, we NEED more Gasbags so I think those Goodyear blimps should be added :). Anyway this can be closed whenever of course; it's just a handy way to hand over the file.
We can have one action job/step that fails when the derivative databases are changed and have another action job/step that succeeds when the derivative databases are no longer changed.
We can fix this by changing the file extension to CSV. @kx1t do you maybe know the reason why the original planepix.txt file was in the TXT extension while the rest of the databases were CSV?
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
It would be amazing to have a simple web application that people can use to search planes.
Describe the solution you'd like
Something similar to https://opensky-network.org/aircraft-database would do. We can also add ➕ and ✏️ symbols which would redirect to the respective lines in the GitHub CSVs. This would give more visibility to the list and make it easier for people to contribute. This is a long shot, but just putting this idea out here 👍🏻.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
It would be helpful if the existing Github Action would add lines to plane_images.txt when new planes are added to plane-alert-db.csv. It would be beneficial to keep the two files in sync. If the user does not update the plane_images.txt file in the pull request that adds a new hex to plane-alert-db.csv, a line with the hex followed by 4 commas would be ideal.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Maybe it is an idea to add a CONTRIBUTING.md file to the repository? We can add some information for contributors when working on this repository. By doing this, we could clean up the README a bit by moving the todos in there (i.e. https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/plane-alert-db#to-do--ideas).
Not an actionable ticket, not presented in a pretty way, but I wanted to see how many unique tags/types/etc there were.
I need to exclude headers, but it's an interesting way to generate the tags for the readme, standardizing them, etc. It'd be nice to map the tags to the definitions of them.