About AeroCorner

AeroCorner is an independent aviation reference and news publication. We cover aircraft, airports, airlines, flight operations and the wider aerospace industry, for anyone who wants a clear answer without wading through a flight manual.

The site combines two things that usually live apart. There are structured databases you can look things up in, and there is written journalism that explains what the numbers actually mean.

All of it is produced and checked by people. Our editorial policy sets out exactly how, including the rule that matters most to us: a person reads and approves every page before it goes live.

What You Will Find Here

AeroCorner has grown into one of the larger independent aviation reference sites on the web. The published library currently covers:

• More than 900 aircraft profiles, from airliners and fighters to bush planes and business jets
• Over 90 aircraft manufacturers, each with the aircraft they built
• More than 1,100 airport pages, organised by region, size and role
• Over 100 head-to-head aircraft comparisons for the matchups people actually argue about
• Hundreds of articles and rankings explaining how aviation works
• A daily aviation news section written from primary sources
• Free tools, including a flight time calculator, an aviation unit converter, a glossary and the phonetic alphabet

How AeroCorner Started

The site launched in 2009 as Aircraft Compare, built around a simple idea: put the specifications of every aircraft in one place, in a form a normal person can read.

In 2019 the whole thing was rebuilt. The technical migration was the easy half. The hard half was going back through every existing aircraft record and bringing it up to a standard we were willing to put our name on.

In May 2021 the site was renamed AeroCorner and moved from aircraftcompare.com to its current home. The name changed because the scope had: by then we were covering airports, airlines, operations and news, not just aircraft specifications.

Today AeroCorner is still independently owned and run. We are not owned by an airline, a manufacturer, a charter broker or a trade association, and nobody outside the site can commission, approve or veto what we publish.

The Aircraft Database

Each aircraft page aims to be the most complete free resource for that specific type. It carries the technical specifications, a photo gallery, video where it exists, and a written background on where the aircraft came from and what it was built to do.

Specifications are the part we are strictest about. Figures are taken from the manufacturer, the type certificate or the operator rather than from another website, and we convert from the unit the source actually used.

Variants get treated as separate aircraft, because they are. A specification borrowed from the wrong sub-type is not a rounding error, it is a different aeroplane.

If you want to put two aircraft side by side yourself, the aircraft comparison tool will do it on any pair in the database, and we publish written comparisons of the matchups people ask about most.

The photography is a collaboration. AeroCorner works with dozens of aircraft spotters and photographers around the world, and their images are what turn a specification table into a tribute to the aircraft. Every photographer is credited, and the terms are set out on our photo usage page.

Airports, Routes and Flight Data

Alongside the aircraft database sits a second one covering more than 1,100 airports, from global hubs down to regional fields, each with its runways, location and the traffic it handles.

On top of that data we build rankings that answer questions a list of airports cannot: the busiest airports by flights per day, the longest runways in the world, the longest scheduled flights, and the busiest routes by region.

We also publish airport delay performance, drawn from aggregated flight activity. That section is still in beta and we label it as such, because coverage is uneven and we would rather say so than imply a completeness we do not have.

Our flight time estimates come from a model that accounts for taxi, climb, descent and the direction you are flying, rather than dividing distance by cruise speed. If you want to know how it works, we wrote up the flight time methodology.

Articles, Rankings and News

The blog is where we explain things. Why flights get delayed, what a dispatcher actually does, why airlines carry more fuel than the trip needs, which aircraft is genuinely the fastest and why the usual answer is wrong.

We write for a mixed audience on purpose. Pilots and engineers read these pages, and so do people who just watched something take off and wondered what it was, so we explain the jargon instead of assuming it.

A lot of that work is built as series rather than one-off posts, because some subjects only make sense as a whole.

How Airlines Actually Work follows an aircraft and a schedule through a single day of operations, and How Air Traffic Control Actually Works does the same for the people watching the radar. The Flights That Changed Aviation traces how specific accidents rewrote the rules everyone flies under today.

The news section works differently. We use industry coverage only to find out what happened, then go to the primary record itself: the accident report, the regulator’s airworthiness directive, the manufacturer’s statement, the text of the ruling.

We never republish someone else’s article. What we publish is our own analysis of the underlying documents, with those documents linked so you can check us.

Who Writes for AeroCorner

AeroCorner is written by a small team with real time in and around aircraft, supported by contributors from across the industry.

• Tim de Vries runs AeroCorner. He oversees the site’s editorial standards and is the final approval on what publishes.
• Matt Claiborne is an FAA Airline Transport Pilot and Certified Flight Instructor with more than two decades in flight training, and a former FAA Part 141 Assistant Chief Instructor for a university aeronautics program.
• Victoria Bottomley is a First Officer on the Airbus A320, flying across Europe with her head in the clouds both literally and otherwise.
• Salomon Marco has been hooked on aviation since his parents put him on a Boeing 720 to visit relatives. When he is not writing he is planespotting or in the cockpit of his favourite aircraft.
• Hanna covers the fun side of flight, from aviation decor and gift guides to the vintage airline memorabilia she collects herself.

Some reference pages carry an Editorial Team byline. That means the page is maintained by several contributors under the same editorial framework rather than owned by one writer, which is honest labelling for a specification record that gets revisited many times.

How We Work

Aviation is a subject where precision matters, and where a small error travels a long way. A range figure that quietly swaps nautical miles for statute miles is wrong by fifteen percent, and it will be quoted back at you for years.

So we built a process around that risk. Facts come from primary sources, anything consequential is corroborated twice, statistics keep the qualifiers their source gave them, and a claim we cannot stand behind gets published as an honest range or not at all.

AI tools help us research and draft, and they decide nothing. Every factual claim is verified against a named source by a person before it goes anywhere, and no page publishes on a model’s say-so.

The full version of all of this, including how we handle corrections and how images are chosen, is in our editorial policy.

Pages Do Not Stay Finished

Aviation moves. Fleets retire, routes open, a type gets a new variant, a ranking that was right in 2021 is quietly wrong by now.

So a published page is not a finished one. We work through the library rebuilding pages against current data rather than bolting a new paragraph onto an old article, and a page we have revisited carries a visible last updated date so you can see how fresh it is.

Where a page has not been touched in a while, the original publication date stands. We would rather you saw an honest date than a refreshed one that means nothing.

How AeroCorner Is Funded

AeroCorner is free to read and funded by display advertising, plus a small amount of affiliate commission when a reader buys something through a link we marked as sponsored.

Neither buys influence. Advertisers have no input into what we cover or how we rank anything, and no merchant has ever been given a place in a list it did not earn on merit.

The limits on how you can use what we publish, and the usual caveat that nothing here is operational or professional advice, are set out in our disclaimer.

Get in Touch

We would genuinely like to hear from you, and there are three messages we are always glad to get.

• We got something wrong. Tell us what and where. Verified factual errors get corrected, and we would much rather be corrected than be quietly inaccurate.
• You photograph aircraft. The galleries exist because spotters share their work with us, and we are always looking for more.
• You know something we do not. Pilots, engineers, controllers and dispatchers have all improved pages here by writing in.

All of it reaches us through the contact page.