Airbus and Boeing dominate the commercial aviation industry, accounting for the vast majority of aircraft carrying passengers and cargo through the skies. With so many similarities between aircraft, it can be difficult to visually differentiate between the two. Here, we’ll take a look at the biggest clues to spotting the difference in the European and American giants’ fleets.

Pellicola has a new logo. Took me about 15 minutes to whip it up in Inkscape.

We had a somewhat rare visitor in NUE today. I managed to quitely disappear from work for a couple of hours to witness the event.

Yesterday, I was sucked into this rabbit hole. I'm not sure how accurate the info is, but it's quite fascinating nonetheless.

I spent Friday night rewriting Tinble's CSS both to simplify it and to make it more, um, stylish? There are still a few ugly styling hacks here and there, but I'm pleased with the result. Source code

Here's another super useful website and app: METAR & TAF. As the name suggests, both provide up-to-date current weather conditions and forecast for the airport of your choosing.

By my rough estimation, I spent maybe one weekend at home in the last couple of months. But even though I felt pretty tired, I talked the missus into spending yet another weekend in Frankfurt. The offer to visit Wiesbaden sealed the deal. A Machiavellian stratagem right there.

Last weekend, I had an opportunity to be a guest on a photo tour organized by AirsideFoto.

Pilot fatigue is in the spotlight this week, after the news that one Indonesian flight had two sleeping pilots at its helm. But military organisations have been grappling with this problem for decades – and they have a surprising solution.

My back pain was getting so bad that I had no other choice but to visit a doctor. His advice? Walk it off. Basically, the suggested cure was plenty of exercise and physical activity — walking being the best one. I reasoned that it wouldn't make much of a difference whether I wander around the neighborhood or in Frankfurt, where I'd be walking in Zeppelinheim and exercising myself by photographing airplanes. So I booked a room at Staycity and took a train to Frankfurt.

Suddenly, everyone wants to be like Airbus. In recent months, Renault, CEO Luca de Meo has called for an “Airbus of autos” to face down the threat, opens new tab to European carmakers from Chinese electric vehicles. In March, the boss of German utility E.ON was fielding questions about the merits of a pan-European mega-utility that could be the “Airbus of energy”. Military specialists antsy about Europe’s highly fragmented defence industry have even been pondering an “Airbus of defence”. That raises two questions – what this outbreak of sloganising actually means; and whether any of the new Airbus obsessives know the full extent of its tortuous back story.

Despite a pretty bad back pain, I ventured to NUE on Sunday, because I really, really wanted to capture an Airbus A400 Atlas. This particular airplane has been on my wish list for a while, but my previous attempts to capture it didn't bear fruit. The Sunday offered two opportunities to photograph the aircraft in NUE. The one belonging to Luftwaffe was scheduled for departure around noon, but my back hurt so much, I had to stay on the couch. The second A400M from Royal Air Force was scheduled to fly out around 16:30 on the same day. And since my back felt marginally better, I had decided that I didn't want to miss it.

The other day, I discovered OliveTin. This brilliant little tool makes it possible to create button-driven Web UIs using nothing but a YAML file. Better still, defining buttons and their actions is so straightforward that you can whip up a server dashboard in a matter of minutes.

It was the Airbus A340-200, entering service with Lufthansa (LH) on its daily flight from Frankfurt to New York (JFK) 31 years ago this month.

We went to Zurich for a short Easter break. For me, the main reason to go there was to photograph airplanes at ZRH. My research indicated that the airport is among the most plane spotter-friendly in Europe. And, boy, wasn't that the truth! The airport has two observation decks. Getting to the Observation Deck B requires a 5CHF ticket and a pass through security. Ironically, observation decks are usually not the best locations for photographing aircraft, but both decks in ZRH are notable exceptions from the rule.

This one was the oldest airplane I've ever photographed. Until it wasn't. Last Monday, another Swearingen Metroliner made a flying (hah!) visit to NUE, and I was there to capture it.

From the dashing Comet to the iconic jumbo jet, our fantasy league table of trailblazing aircraft should provoke plenty of travel nostalgia

I felt a bit under the weather this morning. So I called in sick and spent most of the day on the couch, reading and tweaking Tinble. I've added a page that lists posts and pages sorted by number of reads. Think of it as a poor man's stats. Now it's also possible to append &read=0 parameter to page and article URLs to disable read count. This prevents Tinble from counting your own visits.

This is PGYTECH protective wrap, and it's more than just a thick soft cloth.

In case you haven't noticed, this very blog is powered by Tinble which is a heavily modified fork of Tiny Blog Engine (Tinble stands for tiny blog engine). I removed the parts I don't need, added a handful of features I do need, and I tried to improve the underlying code to the best of my modest abilities.

This 29-year old Fairchild SA-227DC Metro 23 operated by Binair is probably the oldest airplane I had the fortune to photograph.

I used the code that counts downloads to quickly implement views count for each item and the total count in the stats.php page. That's all.

You never know what to expect in NUE, because many flights are not listed in the regular timetable available on Flightradar24. And even if a flight does appear on Flightradar24, there is no guarantee it will be on schedule — or even arrive or depart at all. Today is a case in point. I boarded the bus no. 33 in hope to catch a Luftwaffe Airbus A400M scheduled to arrive from Zaragoza at around 15:16. Well, that didn't happened, with the entry simply vanishing from the Flightradar24 app 30 min. prior to the scheduled arrival. But the moment I rolled my eyes in disbelieve, I caught a glimpse of an approaching airplane that looked suspiciously like a Super Hercules C-130J. And what do you know: it was exactly that!

TIL: The B612 font family developed for use on cockpit screen is avaialable under an open-sorce license. B612 is the result of a research project initiated by Airbus.

Imagine being trapped in politics and suffer from whatever dumb decisions your government makes. That's probably how the Airbus A330-200 with the registration EP-IJA from Iran Air must feel. It ferries passengers between Frankfurt am Main and Tehran on a weekly basis, but it doesn't get a warm welcome in our part of the world.

On Sunday, all I could do was to track via Flightradar24 a Lockheed Martin CC-130J Super Hercules from Royal Canadian Airforce landing in NUE. Why? Because it landed after the sunset. So there was no point in trying to photograph it. I kept an eye on Flightradar24 for departure times, but no dice. So this Monday morning, I decided to take a bus to NUE, even though there was nothing in particular I wanted to photograph, and the weather was uninspiring at best.

This one is straight from the Why haven't I thought about it before? department. In all this time, it has never occurred to me what would happen if I add a photo without EXIF data to Pellicola. Until, of course, I actually tried it. I was dismayed to discover that it breaks Pellicola big time. So I've come up with a fix that hopefully solves the problem.

This is something I've been wanting to add to Pellicola for a long time, but I couldn't figure how. Last weekend, I finally cracked the nut, and now Pellicola can show the photos in the currently viewed album on a map. The clever part is that photos are clustered, making the map more friednly and easier to view.

This Sunday, I decided to explore other photography spot around NUE, and I even managed to convince the missus to join me. It turned out that NUE also has a "Besucherhügel". I put it in quotes, because it's just a mound close to RWY 10. There is a bench and a table, so it does qualify as Besucherhügel I suppose. The weather was unexpectedly good, and there were even a couple of aircraft with liveries I haven't seen before.

While the A380 superjumbo is enjoying a steady resurgence after having been on the brink of retirement during the pandemic, its older sibling – another four-engined aircraft from Airbus – seems dangerously close to being grounded for good.

Tonnenschwere Fracht, viel Platz für Passagiere oder Überschallgeschwindigkeit: Auf dem Nürnberger Flughafen schauten seit seiner Einweihung 1955 schon viele spektakuläre Flugzeuge vorbei. Wir haben eine Auswahl in unserer Bildergalerie zusammengestellt.

The first version of the download stats functionality was pretty simple: each time a file was downloaded, its name was saved in the downloads.txt file as a new line. It's not a particularly practical solution when the download count reaches thousands or tens of thousands.

This weekend, Munich hosted the annual Munich Security Conference, which meant that MUC was filled to the brim with government aircraft from all over the world. And since the weather promised to be pretty good, I decided to spend my Saturday on Besucherhügel. This time, though, I traveled with the missus, who was visiting the local botanical garden, while I was photographing aircraft.

How would you feel about flying in a plane built 50 years ago? We go in search of aviation’s most venerable birds

Today in Pellicola news:

I don't celebrate my birthday, but that doesn't mean I can't get a nice day out of it, especially if it falls on my day-off. So I got up at 7:00 to be at Besucherhügel a bit earlier that usual.

I'm stating the obvious here, but not every aircraft photography outing can be considered a resounding success. Our latest weekend trip to Frankfurt am Main is a case in point. We chose to stay at the b'mine hotel, because the Zeppelinheim viewing platform is only a short bus ride from there. Except there were no busses running on this particular Saturday, because farmers, yet again unhappy about something, used their stupid tractors to block roads around FRA to make their point. And on top of that, the S7 line was still not running due to track repairs. It should have been operational by January 21, but when is anything done on time here in Germany?

The weather was fabulous, so I decided to take a day trip to MUC. But this time, I wanted to give the observation deck a try. Normally, shooting through the glass is lame but, hey, beggars can be choosers (especially if beggars don't drive).

It took me a while, but I've finally implemented RSS support in Pellicola. The rss.php script automatically generates an RSS feed containing a list of recently added photos and their tims. Nothing fancy, but it's a good thing for Pellicola to have.

I've decided to rename Mejiro to Pellicola. Why? Because I wanted the application to have a name related to photography and reflect my affinity for the Italian language. Pellicola means film in Italian, and I like how the word rolls off the tongue.

A few minor but important fixes today.

All I wanted was to make URLs in Mejiro less unwieldy, so look not like this:

The outcome of my first attempt at photographing the D-BADA aircraft was kind of could-be-better-but-it-will-do-fo-now. So I've been waiting for another chance to meet that somewhat elusive machine. Today was the day. Not only its departure was scheduled for 12:00 (meaning that I didn't have to get up in ungodly hour), the weather was wonderful as well: sunny, -2°C, no wind.

I definitely need to put some effort into commenting my code. This is especially true for Mejiro. I started working on it when I was learning PHP, and the code is not exactly a work of a programming genius. I spent few hours today trying to make sense of the jumble I managed to produce, asking myself the same questions again and again: Why does this code do? and Why does it do that?

It's not always about adding new features. Today, I spent the evening improving the existing code in Mejiro. Certain code snippets made me roll my eyes: they seem so clueless. But that's a good thing, I guess. It means that I (very slowly) learn and get better.

Another Monday, another day trip to Besucherhügel. This time, I hoped to catch the Boeing 737-783(WL) operated by Airzena Georgian Airways. The wind and weather forecast looked good, so I thought my odds were pretty good. That is, until RWY 26R (the ideal one) switched to arrivals only, while all departures were happening on RWY 26L (absolutely not the ideal one).

Inexplicably, it never occurred to me look into the error.log file of the lighttpd server. And when I finally did peek into it using the command below, I discovered a few bugs in my PHP code.

A small but important (for me) programming victory. To get a list of hex codes of all aircraft detected by readsb, I used this piece of code suggested by phind:

Creating the Map page was a good learning experience, but in a way the final result was not particularly practical. So I decided to replace it with a dedicated Currently in range page that displays a grid with thumbnails of all aircraft that are currently in range. Each entry contains aircraft data, including hex code, callsign, aircraft type, airline, built date, and route. Here's what each entry in the grid looks like:

I wanted to add a simple search feature to Mejiro, and I ended up spending several evenings tweaking and improving the application. Here's a short changelog:

Here's a new addition to my small but steadily growing collection of Aviationtags:

The title says it all, really. The Map page now shows routes for each aircraft courtesy ADSB.lol API. And the popup next to each aircraft looks like this:

While tweaking Tinble, I discovered the Inter typeface which instantly became my favorite font. So now ADS-B station, Tinble, and Mejiro use Inter.

Today I launched Aircraft Photography. Even though I'm a mediocre amateur photographer at best, I did manage to take a few aircraft photographs that are not all that bad. Instead of letting them gather dust on my machine, I've decided to share them with the world.

When I'm not taking photos of airplanes, I make fleeting connections with truck drivers whizzing by. Sometimes, they blink the lights on their trucks, and I wave back at them. And when I see a particularly flashy truck, I wave to the driver first, and they usually reciprocate by flashing lights and honking. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but there is something special in creating an ephemeral connection with someone, who happened to be at the same place and at the same time as you. I guess it's a tiny acknowledgement of each other's existence by signalling "I see you" and getting back "And I see you too!"

The weather on the second day of the new year was abysmal. It had been pouring down all day long, and wind gusts rendered the umbrella almost useless. So no to aircraft photography, yes to binging on Netflix in my hotel room. Good thing then that I'm staying at b'mine in a plane spotting suite, so at least I could watch aircraft landing.

31st of December — Zeppelinheim. 1st of January — Zeppelineim.