Notable aircraft: rare types and military jets in the journal

Most aircraft in these records are airliners, business jets and small private planes. This topic collects the others: large airliners and freighters such as the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 747 Dreamlifter, military transports and tankers, government jets and types the records rarely contain.

Every ADS-B transmitter broadcasts a 24-bit ICAO address. The site looks that address up in an aircraft database to find the registration, the ICAO type designator and a description, then checks the type against a curated list of notable types and variants. A notable type gets a story at most once every 14 days, whichever airframe flies it. A type recorded on 24 or more of the last 60 days of coverage counts as routine and gets at most one identity story every 30 days, which leaves room for rarer visitors.

A database match describes the aircraft that holds the address now. It cannot prove that the same airframe flew on the day of the story, and it says nothing about who was aboard, where the flight was going or why. Military aircraft are usually listed by serial number instead of a civil registration, so some of these stories identify the aircraft that way. The field guide explains how a type match works and which parts of a story come from the database.