Airliners.net

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Airliners.net
URL http://www.airliners.net/
Commercial? Yes
Type of site aircraft photo archive & database
Owner Johan Lundgren
Created by Johan Lundgren

Airliners.net is an aviation website hosted at Sweden's Luleå University of Technology. It was founded by Johan Lundgren in 1997, evolving from his previous Pictures of Modern Airliners site started in 1994. The site features a large photo database, discussion forums, a chat room, and an aircraft history and information section. It claims to be the world's largest aviation website with over three million page views from 200,000 individuals daily.[1]

The photo database contains over a million photographs of aircraft (the million-photo milestone was reached in May 2006), with accompanying information about the aircraft featured in the photographs. The database may be searched by many parameters, including aircraft registration, line number, location, type of photo, airline and photographer. To ensure the high quality of photographs in the database, photos are screened by photo screeners prior to being accepted. Photos can be commented on, rated, and purchased by visitors.


The discussion forums are divided into separate sections, such as Civil Aviation, Military Aviation and Space, and Technical/Operations. As of February 2007 there are over 46,750 members, and the Civil Aviation forum has passed 3 million posts. Forum moderators volunteer their time to monitor and manage these forums. In addition to the discussion forums, members have access to a chat room which is managed by chat operators. New users must pay either a one-time $25USD fee to join the discussion forums, or join as a "First Class" member for $5 per month, which provides additional features, such as full screen photos and ad-free browsing. If users decide to cancel a first class membership account, Airliners automatically holds the account name so that if, at a later date, the user wishes to rejoin Airliners.net, the account and posts will be remain intact.


In addition to the photo database and discussion forums, the website accepts aviation articles for publishing, has an automatic news service which gathers aviation news from sources around the world, maintains an information database about many aircraft types (based on The International Directory of Civil Aircraft by Gerard Frawley), and hosts a flight and hotel booking service.

Airliners.net has a sister website, MyAviation.net, which accepts all photos and was started to cater for photos which do not pass the quality standards of Airliners.net's database. Other sister websites of similar design are Cardatabase.net and Modified Airliner Photos, which feature photographs of automobiles and modified or Photoshopped images of airliners, respectively. The site has been parodied at Airwhiners.net and Stueywhiners.net.

Members of Airliners.net often organize meetings in different airports all over the world. This gives them a good opportunity to meet each other, share their passion and make new friends. Sites of large meetings have included Amsterdam, Manchester, Barcelona, Madrid/Las Palmas, Zürich, Toronto. In some meetings, people focus only on photography and spotting, but others such as Zürich included organized tours of the airport and others like Barcelona or Prague included a city tour.

[edit] References

  1. ^ About Airliners.net. Retrieved on 2006-06-05.

[edit] External links

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