hi, this is an amazing website but how do i find out the tail number from the flight number that flightaware shows? Thankyou
Someone can help clarify me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe you can find the specific tail number for a commercial flight, as the major carriers swap out aircraft for various reasons so often that it would be impossible to be accurate in telling exactly what jet was running which routes - the aircraft model is about as close as you are going to get. As far as GA aircraft though, the tail numbers are always listed as the identifier, whereas commercial traffic uses the flight numbers.
It’s not so much the swapping out of aircraft but that aircraft are scheduled to fly different flights on different days.
It is possible to get the tail number in a couple of ways. The BTS (Bureau of Transport Statistics) publishes on-time statistics that show tail numbers, although some airlines report fleet numbers which can be translated into tail numbers. The site is at www.bts.gov
Another way to find tail numbers of some aircraft is to use ACARS. Please search the forum for more information on this.
There - I knew if anyone knew, it’d be you. Good job dami
Thanks, Wiser.
The exact site is transtats.bts.gov/DL_SelectF … me=On-Time
Please note that the files are huge! If you select all of the data for a given month for all states you are talking about over 500,000 records. You’ll need Excel 2007 or Access (or another database program) to open the records.
You can chose individual states which will have less records naturally. Some of these may have record counts that are larger than Excel 2003 and earlier can handle.
The latest data will be from two months ago (e.g. downloading today will get you the October (and earlier) data).
appreciate the replies guys , i know what acars is but is there a website then that i can obtain tail numbers via acars?
Or use a search engine to search for the information.
acarsd.org/acars_search.html are the two I use most often. There are many others, Google is your friend.