Vintage aircraft: decades-old airframes still flying

Some aircraft in these records were built during or before the Second World War. Douglas DC-3s, wartime trainers such as the North American T-6 Texan and biplanes like the Waco UPF-7 still fly, many of them kept airworthy by museums, collectors and restoration groups, and their transponders show up next to the airliners overhead.

The site reads the year of manufacture from the aircraft database. An airframe must be at least 80 years old on the day it was observed, and the bar rises for types that appear often: a type recorded on one or two of the last 60 days of coverage needs 83 years, one recorded on three to six days needs 85, and any other type needs 87. A year earlier than the earliest plausible year for the type is treated as a database error and ignored. The same airframes return to the same fields, so an airframe waits 90 days after a story before its next one, and older airframes and rarer types rank first.

A database year can be wrong. A restored aircraft can carry the identity of an older airframe, a registration can move from one aircraft to another, and some entries are simply mistaken, so stories give an age "by its database record". The photos on these pages show the type, and they are not pictures of the aircraft in the story unless the caption says so.