plane-alert-db

May 7, 2026 · View on GitHub

This project consists of lists of 'interesting' aircraft, formatted as CSV files. The list is designed to work with the excellent https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-planefence.

Warning Please only suggest/make any changes to the plane-alert-db.csv, plane-alert-pia.csv, and plane_images.csv files on GitHub - all other files (except PIA) are generated from this file, and if you do not make your changes there, they will be overwritten and lost. Additionally, it is not recommended to edit the CSV files in Microsoft Excel, as Excel will attempt to "fix" some ICAO hexes and other fields. It's better to use a code editor such as VS Studio Code—you can access the web version of Code by pressing the period key . when viewing the file you wish to edit.

Current Content

There currently are about 15985 unique aircraft in 53 categories found in this repository. This Dashboard contains details of the main list. These aircraft are divided into four main databases:

plane-alert-db.csv - A list of interesting aircraft with tags, categories and links. (15985)
plane-alert-pia.csv: A list that contains PIA planes. (94)
plane_images.csv: A accompanying list that contains aircraft images. (12216)

Based on these main databases, several derivative databases are created using a GitHub action:

plane-alert-civ.csv - Civilian Registered Aircraft, includes Historic and Distinctive. (4540)
plane-alert-mil.csv - Military Only. (8760)
plane-alert-pol.csv - Police Forces. (939)
plane-alert-gov.csv - Governments, Gov Agencies and Dictators. (1746)

A second version of each of the above lists contains up to 4 image links per aircraft. These lists are created in GitHub action using the plane_images.csv database. Please consider this experimental, do not come to rely on any of the image links

Note, we used to create a seperate list, plane-alert-twitter-blocked.csv, for use with Planefence's Twitter posting functionality. This list would prevent certain aircraft from being posted to Twitter in an attempt to keep the posting bot account from being banned. Since Twitter has now made it all but impossible for users to make bots for free, we've stopped creating this list.

This Dashboard contains details of the main list.

Description of Categories

Think of categories like groups, with similar or related aircraft listed together. This allows you to easily select a subset of the list for your own use. The category names (and tags) come from my rather idiosyncratic sense of humour. If you have better suggestions I'm all ears.

Category	Description	Count
Aerial Firefighter	Firefighting Aircraft	356
Aerobatic Teams	Red Arrows, Blue Angels, etc.	78
Army Air Corps	UK Army Air Corps, mainly Helicopters	94
As Seen on TV	Companies and Brands	494
Big Hello	Large Helicopters (sic)	106
Bizjets	Fancy pants planes for fancy pants people	67
CAP	Civil Air Patrol.	18
Climate Crisis	Oil Companies, Large Business Jets - BBJs and ACJs	196
Coastguard	Coastguard, Customs and Border Patrols	449
Da Comrade	Russian or Soviet Aircraft	92
Dictator Alert	People of potentially questionable morals and values	310
Distinctive	Unique and/or special aircraft e.g. The AN-225 Myria, NASA aircraft, Testbeds	219
Dogs with Jobs	Aircraft with specific roles and/or modifications	212
Don't you know who I am?	Famous People. I was going to say notable, but I'll go with Famous	81
Flying Doctors	Air Ambulance and Medical Flights	827
Football	Actual, Aussie Rules or American. We don't discriminate.	22
GAF	Aircraft of the German Air Force	414
Gas Bags	Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?	14
Governments	Aircraft registered to Governments	272
Gunship	Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt	265
Hired Gun	Why do the dirty work when someone else can do it for you?	330
Historic	It's older than I am and most likely has a prop.	544
Jesus he Knows me	Aircraft owned and operated by religious organisations	24
Joe Cool	Cool Planes. Or at least I think they are cool.	263
Jump Johnny Jump	de Havilland Chipmunks. Air Cadets of a certain age will understand.	388
Nuclear	Nuclear Emergency Support Team etc.	19
Oligarch	I made this money all by myself.	39
Other Air Forces	Air Force aircraft that are not GAF, RAF, or USAF	2100
Other Navies	Navy Aircraft that are not Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm or United States Navy	200
Oxcart	Intelligence gathering aircraft	681
Perfectly Serviceable Aircraft	Why do you keep jumping out of a Perfectly Serviceable Aircraft aka Skydiving planes	75
PIA	Privacy ICAO Address....you can run, but you cannot hide.	15
Police Forces	Your friendly neighbourhood flying (insert local colloquialism here).	921
Ptolemy would be proud	Mapping and Aerial Survey aircraft.	239
Quango	NATO, United Nations, World Bank etc.	33
Radiohead	Very Very special aircraft. Think VC25.	5
RAF	Aircraft of the Royal Air Force	248
Royal Aircraft	Aircraft used or owned by the UK Royal Family	8
Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm	Aircraft of the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm	97
Special Forces	The best of the best of the best. Sir.	179
Toy Soldiers	Armies from around the world.	1074
UAV	It's not natural, I tell 'ya!	64
UK National Police Air Service	Your friendly neighbourhood flying bobby.	24
Ukraine	Aircraft from Ukraine	36
United States Marine Corps	Aircraft of the United States Marine Corps, Oorah!	271
United States Navy	United States Naval avaitors. Some say they are the best of the best.	647
USAF	Aircraft of the United States Air Force	2451
Vanity Plate	Distinctive registrations	78
Watch Me Fly	Flying and Training Schools	75
You came here in that thing?	Microlights, tiny planes and helis..think Yakima Super Breezy.	114
Zoomies	Fast jets, fighters. Anything that moves fast.	140

Planefence

The list takes the form:

$ICAO	$Registration	$Operator	$Type	$ICAO Type	#CMPG	$Tag 1	$#Tag 2	$#Tag 3	Category	$#Link
502C5C	YL-KSH	Baltic Bees display team	Aero L-39C Albatross	L39	Civ	Do A Barrel Roll	Display Team	Aerobatics	Aerobatic Teams	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Bees_Jet_Team

To use this list with Planefence, configure your planefence.config setup to include the following line:

PF_ALERTLIST=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdr-enthusiasts/plane-alert-db/main/plane-alert-db.csv

If you want to add the list in addition to your local plane-alert-db.csv list, you can do the following:

PF_ALERTLIST=plane-alert-db.csv,https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdr-enthusiasts/plane-alert-db/main/plane-alert-gov.csv,https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdr-enthusiasts/plane-alert-db/main/plane-alert-pol.csv

Note The priority of use is first-to-last, so if you want your local list to be interpreted first, move it to the front of the list.

Add these characters to the column headers to control the behaviour of PlaneAlert

$ - Tweet this column as #hashtag.
# - Don't show on the website (it will ignore this for the ICAO field, which is always shown).
$# - Don't show on the website; tweet as a #hashtag.

Contributing

Feel free to open an issue if you have ideas on improving this repository or want to report a bug! All contributions are welcome 🚀. Please consult the contribution guidelines for more information. You can also check out the TODOS page if you want to contribute to this repository but need some ideas.

Warning As also explained above, this repository contains four main databases to which people can contribute. The other databases are created automatically using GitHub action. As a result, please only suggest/make any changes to these main databases. Changes made to all other CSV files will be overwritten and lost. Additionally, it is not recommended to edit the CSV files in Microsoft Excel, as Excel will attempt to "fix" some ICAO hexes and other fields. It's better to use a code editor such as VS Studio Code—you can access the web version of Code by pressing the period key . when viewing the file you wish to edit.

If you're creating a pull request with additions, please add them to the end of the file. We may sort the list periodically to group like planes together.

Disclaimer, excuses and dodges

This is not intended to be a definitive list, especially when it comes to aircraft models. Where the same model of aircraft is made by several manufacturers I won't always have the correct one. If you thought it was a Beechcraft King Air 200 and actually it was a Textron Super King Air B200GT, I won't be losing any sleep. There are other data sources (see below) if you want absolute accuracy.

Data Sources

This data has been gathered from far too many sources to mention, but some sites have been really useful:

LICENSE

This Database is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/ Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/