About the archive

What is held

Two kinds of flight record, and they are not interchangeable.

A sector is a two-ended record: this flight number, this date, this departure and this arrival, usually with the registration of the aircraft that operated it. Sectors come from the operational data of four airline groups — British Airways, the Lufthansa group and its partners, Air France–KLM and its partners, and TAP Air Portugal — and because those records capture whoever actually flew the sector, they cover 364 operating carriers rather than four. Those four sources begin in 2020; a fifth, matched British Airways and bmi sectors at Heathrow and Gatwick, reaches back to 1990 and carries no aircraft registration, so it builds flight-number and route history but never an airframe’s.

A movement is a one-ended record: an arrival at or departure from a single airport, with the other airport, the flight number and the aircraft. The movements held are Heathrow’s and Gatwick’s. This is the deepest material on the site and the part that exists nowhere else in this form.

The archive’s default view starts at 1990, which is where the movements record starts being a movements record. Everything before it is held, addressable and linked — see the early records below — but it is a different kind of material and it is not mixed in with the rest.

An aircraft’s page merges both, which is why an airframe can show movements in 1974 and sectors in 2024 and nothing in between: those are two different records of the same aeroplane, kept by different people for different reasons.

Coverage is graded, not assumed

Seventy years of airport records were not kept to one standard. Some years are a complete movements record; some are a spotter’s log, which captures what one observer happened to see rather than what flew. Presenting those alike would make the archive worse than useless — it would make absence look like evidence.

So every airport-year carries a grade, shown on the page itself:

A thin early year reflects the recording, not the traffic. Heathrow was busy in 1961 whatever this archive holds for it.

The early records, 1955–1989

Heathrow and Gatwick material reaches back to 1955: 126,967 records across 51 airport-years. Every one of those years is graded sightings — a spotter’s log, which captures what one observer happened to see rather than what flew. That is why the rest of the site now opens at 1990: not because the early material is unwanted, but because presenting a hundred sightings beside a year of half a million movements makes both harder to read.

Nothing here has been removed or redirected: every early year keeps its address and is linked from the airport and aircraft pages it belongs to. What these records can still answer is narrow and real — whether a particular airframe was seen at Heathrow in a given year, and what an observer recorded on a given day. What they cannot answer is how much flew, and no page here implies otherwise.

Ships

85,989 vessels and 47,422,660 position reports, from 2021 onwards. Vessels are identified by IMO number, which stays with a hull for its life. They are deliberately not identified by MMSI: that follows the flag and is reassigned, hundreds of MMSIs in this data are shared by more than one ship, and thousands are invalid. An MMSI that maps to exactly one vessel will redirect to that vessel’s IMO page; an ambiguous one is refused rather than guessed.

A vessel page is built from position aggregates — first and last seen, days with reports, the bounds of where it was observed. There are no voyage or port-call pages, because there is no voyage record in the data: deriving one from raw positions would be inference presented as fact.

The harbours section is the one part of this site that is reference rather than record. It reproduces the World Port Index — 3,630 harbours, their position, size, shelter and facilities — and it contains no traffic at all, because none is held. Where a harbour lists vessels, the claim is deliberately narrow: every position report held for that vessel falls inside that harbour’s waters, which is true of tugs and ferries and can never be true of a ship that goes to sea. It is not a record of calls.

What is deliberately not here

• Live status. No page here answers “where is this flight now”. That question wants today, and this archive cannot serve it.
• Trains and coaches. Airlines sell rail and surface segments under flight numbers — nearly 400,000 of them are in the source data, flagged by the sources’ own equipment codes. This is a flight archive, so they are excluded. One code disappeared entirely as a result: AccesRail is not an airline.
• Placeholder registrations. WILAD means “will advise” — the tail was not known when the record was written. It was the most-recorded “aircraft” in the archive, ahead of every real airframe, and it is excluded by name along with the other placeholders.

Registrations without a hyphen are not placeholders. Thousands of real airframes — G-BVKD, G-MIDW and their like — appear bare simply because the movements archive stores them that way, and that archive is their entire recorded history.

How addresses work

Every record has one fixed, guessable address, and partial addresses list what is below them.

Registrations match with or without the hyphen and redirect to the canonical form, as do ICAO airline codes (/dlh/ to /lh/). There are no query parameters, no sort or filter links, and nothing that generates a second address for the same record.