About FLYPEDIA

So, who the hell built this?

FLYPEDIA is a solo project. There isn’t a massive company behind it, a secret team of aviation historians in a basement, or a room full of interns researching the landing gear of a 1950s prototype. It’s me. I’m a solo developer, an aviation enthusiast, and apparently someone who looked at the entire history of aviation and thought, “You know what would be a reasonable thing to do? Build an encyclopedia about it.” I could have built a calculator, a weather app, maybe even a nice little gardening website. Instead, I chose aviation: roughly 7 billion aircraft, 14 billion technical specifications and enough historical arguments to make Wikipedia editors look like they’re having a relaxing afternoon.

Why airplanes?

Because airplanes are bloody fascinating. You start by thinking, “That’s a cool plane,” then you wonder why the wing looks like that, why the engine is there, why it was built in the first place, and suddenly you’re three hours deep into a prototype that flew twice in 1967 and was abandoned behind a hangar. Why did anyone build it? Why did it fail? Why does it look like a Cessna Caravan got drunk, joined the military and came back as the next generation of fighter jet? That’s aviation. It’s engineering, history, economics, politics, design, ambition, failure and thousands of engineers arguing with physics until physics eventually says, “Fine, but I’m taking your fuel efficiency.”

So why build FLYPEDIA?

I wanted somewhere where you could actually discover an aircraft rather than just read a specification sheet. Knowing that something has a certain speed, range and engine tells you what it has, not what it is. Why was it designed? What problem was it solving? How did it evolve? Did it succeed? Did it fail? Why does it matter? FLYPEDIA is my attempt to answer those questions and turn an aircraft from a name and photograph into something you actually understand. Ideally, you arrive knowing nothing, learn something genuinely interesting, then click another aircraft and suddenly it’s 1:30 in the morning and you’re reading about a Soviet prototype that looks like a submarine with wings. Congratulations. You’ve discovered aviation.

A digital aviation museum

I don’t really think of FLYPEDIA as just another website. The idea is much closer to a digital aviation museum: aircraft, photographs, history, technical information and stories, all presented in one place without requiring you to travel three hours to stand next to a Lockheed something-or-other and read a laminated information board written in a font selected during the Cold War. I want FLYPEDIA to cover everything from legendary airliners and fighters to helicopters, trainers, transports, gliders, experimental aircraft, agricultural planes and wonderfully strange machines that somehow convinced an entire engineering department that yes, this was definitely a good idea.

And yes, I use AI

FLYPEDIA is developed with the help of AI tools for coding, debugging, refactoring, brainstorming, research and plenty of repetitive work. But it isn’t an “AI-generated aviation encyclopedia” where I typed “make website about planes” and went to sleep while a robot invented 400 aircraft. The direction, design, structure, ideas and final decisions are mine. AI is an extremely useful tool, but it also has a remarkable ability to confidently tell you something completely wrong, so I’ve learned that “trust me, I checked” coming from a language model is approximately as reassuring as a pilot announcing, “Don’t worry, I’ve never actually flown this one before.”

Aviation has some questionable ideas

Not every aircraft is beautiful, sensible or successful, and honestly, that’s part of the fun. Some are engineering masterpieces; others look like a Cessna Caravan was given a military budget and told to “figure something out.” Aviation history is full of strange prototypes, cancelled projects, technological dead ends and machines that look like someone designed them after losing a bet with an aerodynamicist. Some changed the future, some were so terrible that the future politely pretended they never existed, and some were simply weird. All of them have a story.

Airbus vs Boeing

Obviously, I have opinions. Some are reasonable, some probably aren’t, and the Airbus vs Boeing debate is one of those subjects capable of turning perfectly normal aviation enthusiasts into lawyers within about thirty seconds. Both companies have produced legendary aircraft: the 747 is one of the most important aircraft ever built and my favourite airliner, while the 777 is basically someone saying, “Make it enormous, make it reliable and don’t ask too many questions.” Airbus, meanwhile, brought us fly-by-wire, the A320 family, the A330, the A350 and a rather impressive collection of aircraft that somehow make the cockpit look like a spaceship. Both have made incredible machines, questionable decisions and aircraft that occasionally make enthusiasts stare at a screen and whisper, “Why?”

So, after all that, you probably want to know what I actually think. Airbus is obviously the better manufacturer. There, I said it. I will defend this completely scientific conclusion with absolutely unnecessary confidence.

I’m joking. I prefer CubCrafters. 😂🛩️

Where this is going

FLYPEDIA is still evolving, and there will be mistakes, corrections, bugs and probably moments where I question why I thought building an aviation encyclopedia alone was a reasonable use of my time. But that’s part of it. The goal is to keep growing it piece by piece, aircraft by aircraft, while making sure it remains coherent and enjoyable rather than becoming a gigantic digital hangar where someone threw every aircraft manual onto the floor and turned off the lights.

And if you’ve found an aircraft here that you didn’t know about before, then FLYPEDIA has already done something useful. If you’ve spent an hour clicking through aircraft you never intended to look at, then I’m sorry.

Actually, no.

You’re welcome.

Oh, and there are Easter eggs hidden around FLYPEDIA. Some are obvious, some are stupid, and some are probably going to make absolutely no sense unless you happen to share my particular brand of aviation brain damage. I’m not telling you where they are. If you notice something strange and think, “Did they seriously put that here?”, maybe you found one.