New spotterblog.com database

spotterblog logo
We are very happy to announce that we have redesigned and improved our photo database during the last weeks. More details below.
Speed and bandwidth
We dramatically reduced the needed bandwidth to browse the database and improved the response time to a state of the art one. We reached this because we removed the small thumbnail pictures in front of each database entry and because me made a lot of code improvements. You can now reach the detail pages of each registration by clicking at a “LINK” in front of each entry instead of the thumbnail pictures.
We also improved the whole database to handle UTF8 standard. So there should be no ? instead of special letters anymore.

Separation of Civil and Military registrations
We also separated the registrations of civil and military aircrafts. On the top of the civil country overview page and on the top of the military air forces overview page you can select the other section by clicking at “CIVIL” or “MILITARY”.


Other improvements in the civil section
Each country got an own overview page with an airline overview of airlines which have registered aircrafts in the selected country. Additional to the airline names we also added the IATA and ICAO codes of the airlines.

By clicking at one of the airline logos you reach the general overview of this airline with all our spotted aircrafts of this airline independent of the country they are registered in. At the bottom of each airline page you also find the „Historic“ section. In this section we include all aircrafts which are no longer flying for the respective airline but were spotted while flying for the airline. This can mean that these aircrafts are now flying for another airline, but can also mean that they are stored, scraped or crashed.

If you want to see all our spotted aircrafts which are registered in a country you can select “All” in the respective country overview page.

On this page you can see all active aircrafts we have spotted. This page is separated into the airlines from the overview page and additionally to the “Others” section where you can find for example business or general aviation aircrafts, but also aircrafts of airlines which have no detail page yet.

If you want to see all registrations of the “Others” section only, you can also select the “Other operators” button on the country overview page of each country.

If you are interested in historic planes which are no longer flying for the originally spotted airline, just select the “Historic” button in the overview page of the country.

Some country overview pages contain just “All”, “Other operators” and “Historic” Buttons because we don’t have any airline of that country in our database yet.

Generally we will update all countries from time to time, to include new spotted airlines or remove airlines if they ceased operations.
Other improvements of the military section
Similar to the country overview in the civil section, we created an air force overview page in the military section.

By clicking at the air force logos you reach the detail pages of the air forces. This pages are separated in an active section and a historic section where you can see spotted aircrafts which are no longer in service.

Future improvements
We already have some improvements for the database which we want to implement in the next months.
- As you may already noticed we have a common watermark now for the whole team. So we will replace all pictures with other watermarks in the database during the next months. During this step we will also re-edit old pictures or even remove pictures from the database which are no longer good enough for our quality standards.

- We will implement a new prototype section where you can find spotted prototypes of the aircraft manufacturers as well as pictures of test registrations.
- In the airline pages we will add the last checked date of the fleet status, so that you know when the status was checked the last time. This checks are necessary to keep the active and historic sections up to date. Additionally to that, we will create a new mail address where you can inform us if you find an error or an information which need to be revised. You will find this mail address at several locations in the database. Alternatively you can also contact us via Facebook or Instagram.
- We will implement an advanced database search where you can select the meta data you want to search for.
- We are already thinking about some other improvements but at the moment the above ones are the next steps.
If you have some comments or some feedback, we would be very happy to hear from you. Just send us an email or a direct message on Facebook or Instagram.