Airliners.net
From Free net encyclopedia
Image:Anetlgo.jpg Airliners.net is an aviation website hosted at Sweden's Luleå University of Technology. It was founded by Johan Lundgren in 1996. The site features a large photo database, discussion forums and a chat room. It claims to be the world's largest aviation website with over two million page views from 200,000 individuals daily.
The photo database contains over 980,000 photographs of aircraft as of April 2006, with accompanying information about the aircraft featured in the photographs. The database is searcheable by many parameters such as registration, line number, airport, type of photo, and airline. To ensure the quality of photographs in the database, photos are screened by photo screeners before being accepted. Photos can be commented on, rated, and purchased by visitors. A sister website which accepts all photos, MyAviation.net, has been set up to cater for photos which do not pass the quality standards of Airliners.net's database.
The discussion forums are divided into separate sections, such as Civil Aviation, Military Aviation and Space, and Technical/Operations. As of April 2006 there are over 30,000 members, of whom approximately 5,000 made posts during January 2006. Forum moderators volunteer their time to manage these forums. In addition to the discussion forums, members have access to a chat room which is managed by chat operators.
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 sister websites of similar design at Cardatabase.net, Flight Level 350 and Modified Airliner Photos. The site has been parodied at Airwhiners.net and Eurowhiners.net. Jetphotos.net (based in the United States) is a similar site that also has a large photo database.
Criticism
There has been much criticism of the site over the last several years for having different and much lower acceptance standards for their regular photographers compared to those who submit rarely. They have also been said to have uneven moderating policies, giving some people bans for over a year that others might get seven days for.