Tracking by registration number

Greetings,

I’ve been trying to track a few United Airlines aircraft I’ve recently flown on by registration number but have been unsuccessful thus far. The site states that it cannot locate the registration I am looking for. Does United block individual registration numbers or am I doing something wrong? My goal is merely to see where these particular aircraft I have flown on are flying at the present time. Can anyone offer some insight?

Thanks

As it stands, you can only track aircraft by registration number if that’s their identifier during flights. Commercial flights generally operate under their airline code and flight number, so that is generally the only way to track them. As you probably know, there is no real association between an aircraft and a flight number.

Ahhhhh, that makes sense now. Thanks for the prompt reply!

This question seems to keep cropping up, perhaps a sticky is needed ?

To find the tail number for a specific airline flight you can query the ACARS databases: for example
antonakis.co.uk/acars.php?page=request or
acarsd.org/acars_search.html (there are probably others)

For US domestic flights, the DoT keeps records, although there is a delay of about a month before they get posted:
bts.gov/cgi-bin/ntda/oai/Det … /OAI_B1.PL

hth