Dave Gevers has spent over a decade building the largest known index of aircraft makes and models. The focus of this effort has been on ensuring accuracy with direct citations for each discovered model. Dave leveraged his library of over 5,000 aviation publications to create an index which is resilient to the numerous data quality issues present in aircraft catalogs. Significant ambiguity exists in model names, variations, progressions, etc. The database he has curated attempts to solve for each of these challenges to create a highly accurate picture of the number and types of aircraft in existence globally.

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Current Status

The database is not yet available in an online-searchable way but work is planned to make this possible.

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The current dataset contains 5,000 books with over 80,000 aircraft models across a wide variety of categories including classics, military, racing, homebuilts, prototypes, production, helicopters, airships, historic proposals, and early experiments.

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One of the most interesting findings has been the geometric relationship of aircraft models to their citations. Thanks in part to the specificity of aircraft model designations, most models are found in a very small number of publications. A clear relationship between models and reference counts surfaced early in the dataset's life and has been maintained consistently even as the database has grown an order of magnitude in size.