Experimental Aircraft Flights

What is shown for the TYPE of aircraft to designate an experimental aircraft flight? This would be the case for experimental aircraft flying IFR in the US system. Anyone have the answer?

I don’t think you’ll find anything to categorically identify a plane as experimental. I think you’d have to pick a particular experimental aircraft type first - then find the tail number of one of that particular aircraft type - do a search and see what appears as the aircraft type…

For instance - assuming that a Lancair IV-P kit plane is experimental (I don’t know if it is or not, but let’s just assume for the moment that it is)…
I could go to Lancair’s IV-P Web site:
http://www.lancair.com/Main/iv_ivp.html

There I see a photo showing a IV-P with tail number N6XE
Insert that tail number in the FA tracker:
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N6XE
and I see a HUGE mistake! :blush:

It’s coming up as a “Avro 683 Lancaster (quad-piston) (LANC/G)”
Okay - bad example…

Okay - let’s say a Cessna 172 is experimental…
(another bad example - all of Cessna’s planes with visible tail numbers in their gallery are blocked…)
But let’s say I looked at their Web site and saw a picture of a Cessna 172 with the tail number N172BW

I then search on N172BW:
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N172BW

and I see its type is identified with “C172/T” (upper right of the data area)

I can then go to FA’s aircraft type search:
http://flightaware.com/live/aircrafttype/C172

And then plug-in that aircraft type…

Hope that helps…

Found this at duat.com, but I couldnt find any on flightaware, maybe there just weren’t any up this time of the night!
HXA/A Experimental IAS Less Than 100 Kt
HXB/A Experimental IAS 100 To 200 Kt
HXC/A Experimental IAS More Than 200 Kt

Here’s a quick and dirty list of recent idents to use HX aircraft types:

N142BW | HXB
N2084D | HXB
N229KB | HXB
N352JU | HXA
N3XF | HXC
N40LE | HXB
N442DC | HXB
N490KQ | HXB
N550MP | HXB
N772SF | HXB
N789PP | HXB
N87GE | HXB
N949Y | HXP
N988CS | HXB
N994PG | HXB

I haven’t looked at any of them, so some of them may be a one-off mistyped by FSS/ATC.

N3XF is the Epic LT, the turboprop I mentioned over at the Unofficial FlightAware blog.
Epic aircraft is going to debut the new EpicJet at Oshkosh in a couple weeks. It looks very similar to the Eclipse. I will definately go see that booth! The LT is a very cool turboprop!
(anyone else going to be there? Its only, you know, “the greatest aviation celebration in the world”)
-J-

Edit: A couple of those aircraft read in FlightAware as “Scaled Composites Global Flyer.” Either the FAA or FlightAware is confused. I looked up a few of the N-numbers, one was a Velocity RG.

Yea, the Global Flyer files (approprately) as HXC, and somehow that was put in as the aircraft name. I’ll change it soon to appropriate generic names for HXA/B/C.

My question to FLIGHTAWARE is, when are they going to fix the bug in dealing with experimental ac flying IFR?

You could look it up in BugAware once they fix the bug that prevents searching :wink: