Watchlisted aircraft: Plane Alert DB entries in the journal

Plane Alert DB is a community-maintained list of aircraft that spotters like to follow, including government and military aircraft, historic airframes and distinctive liveries. Each entry has a category. When an aircraft from the list appears in these records, the site can publish a story that names the category and credits the list.

Matching uses the aircraft's broadcast ICAO address against a pinned copy of the list, so every story can be traced to the version that produced it, and the registration in the aircraft database must match the list entry's. When the two registrations differ, or the database and the address disagree about the aircraft's identity, the site withholds the match. The page shows the neutral category, the list's attribution and its licenses. Some entries describe an aircraft with the name of a person or company, and those labels never appear in the stories.

A list entry records why someone found an aircraft interesting. It does not show who was aboard, what the flight was for or where it went, and the site does not guess. A listed business jet can carry its owner, a charter customer, a maintenance crew or nobody but the pilots on a positioning flight. The aircraft database and the list can also be out of date, so each story says which source supplied which detail and links to both.