Airplane Registration Lookup

Discontinued HTA Version 1.04

Important Notice

Development on the HTA version of AirReg has been discontinued.

I rewrote AirRegGUI.ps1 from scratch in PowerShell to get a more reliable program.
The HTA relied too much on Internet Explorer to retrieve data from the web, which required heavy maintenance at almost every Windows (security) update.

You can continue using this HTA version if you choose so, but it will no longer be maintained.

Click here to go to the current AirRegGUI page.

This is a simple demo script to lookup airplane data by entering their registration number.
The script uses Airport-data.com's API to provide a photograph of the airplane, and a link to more data.

Enter a registration number in the input field, e.g. PHPBY, and click the "Lookup" button to search for its data.

Click the image to view more photographs and registration data on Airport-data.com's website.

Note that the author of this script is in no way associated with Airport-data.com.

Click the "Help" button or press F1 for help.
Click the current version number to check for updates.

Click the "Back" button or press Esc to return to the main screen.

Though Airport-data.com has records for many airplanes, they don't have records for all.
If you want to increase your chances for FAA-registered airplanes ("N-numbers"), you can download the FAA's Releasable Aircraft Registry Database and place the files MASTER.txt and ACFTREF.txt in this HTA's parent folder.

Each time the HTA is started, it checks if these files are available, and if so, loads them in a background thread.
Whenever an aircraft registration is not found on Airport-data.com, and the registration starts with an N followed by at least one numerical digit, the HTA will search these files.
No photo will be shown, and the link will lead you to a list of search results in StartPage.com.

Note that a local FAA database search takes a lot longer than an Airport-data.com query.

Change History

Version	Release Date (yyyy-mm-dd)	Changes
1.04	2020-02-15	Optional local FAA database search Larger window to fit in the extra help text Help button (using F1 for help remains possible as well)
1.03	2020-02-05	Longer registration numbers are allowed (up to 8 characters instead of 6) Dashes are no longer allowed in N registrations (e.g. N-18906 is not allowed, N18906 is) Better input filtering: dash as first character is not allowed, all dashes are removed if more than one dash is used
1.02	2020-02-03	External URLs will now be opened in the default browser when clicked Window size has been adapted to Windows 10's larger system icons in the window's title bar
1.01	2016-10-21	error handling for missing or misplaced hyphen was added in case of access denied errors in Windows 8 and 10, `InternetExplorer.Application` will be used to fetch the data; this is much slower than the standard `Microsoft.XMLHTTP` but at least it works
1.00	2015-11-29	First public release.

Checksums:
File name:	airreg.zip
MD5:	0d767202dc9b1fd97a61567c01c59023
SHA1:	a61193a8a7531f349fecc7b153ba40333c0f4c1d