About Vuelopedia
independent encyclopedia
Vuelopedia is the encyclopedia of the world's leading civil aircraft: not a catalogue of models, but the individual record of each aircraft, with its history, its year-by-year flight logbook, its background, its photographs and its live position. An independent, non-profit project of the Fundación Poderia.
A catalogue permanently under construction. Vuelopedia was born in 2025 and its catalogue grows every day: it currently holds about 30% of the information we expect to have by the third quarter of 2027. Although we use only official, highly reliable sources, some aircraft data and history may still contain errors or inaccuracies. Every day we work to clear the records of any anomaly with specialized verification tools and to grow the information: more aircraft, more history and more detail.
The idea: a biography for every aircraft
Most aviation sources talk about models. Vuelopedia talks about individual aircraft. Every aircraft has its registration, its serial number (MSN), the date it first flew, the airlines it passed through, the airports that saw it land and, sometimes, the story that marked it. All of that lives in one place: its record.
Every aircraft, one record
Identity, age and status, technical data (engines, seats by class), liveries, operator history and a flight logbook reconstructed year by year.
And a human memory
An aircraft is not just a machine: it witnesses honeymoons, first trips and journeys home. Memories let people write their story into the record of the aircraft that lived it.
What we believe in
Six principles that guide every decision in the project.
Clarity above all
Aviation knowledge should be presented clearly and honestly, so that anyone can understand it, not only specialists.
Non-profit
Vuelopedia does not exist to sell, but to document and preserve.
Rigour and verifiable sources
Every piece of data comes from sources we can audit: official registries, public flight data and documented accident databases.
Transparency
We explain how everything is built. The ranking methodology is public and reproducible; nothing is a black box.
Independence
We are not affiliated with or endorsed by any airline, manufacturer or authority. Nobody pays to appear or for their position.
Ethical AI
Artificial intelligence is used to organise, verify and explain —never to invent— with the same ethical standard the foundation promotes.
How it is built, step by step
1Gather from public, verifiable sourcesFleets and registrations, official aviation registries from several countries, accident and incident databases, official flight data and photographs from public repositories. Every piece keeps its origin.
2Normalise and resolve identitiesThe same aircraft, airlines and models appear written in a thousand different ways. A normalisation process —supported by AI— unifies them into a single, coherent identity.
3Written in our own words, never copiedNews and background are rewritten in our own voice from the facts; third-party texts are not copied. The source is documented and other people's rights are respected.
4Assemble the recordAll the information about an aircraft is composed into a single living document: its data sheet, its history, its logbook and its gallery. When new data arrives, the record is rebuilt.
5Keep it up to dateAutomatic processes bring in recent incidents and fleet changes, so the encyclopedia reflects the world as it changes.
Transparency: where the data comes from
We believe an encyclopedia should be able to point to the origin of what it states. Vuelopedia is built from public, official and openly accessible sources —never from private listings or third-party services with usage restrictions. These are the main ones:
Authorities and official bodies
Aviation registries and accident investigation agencies from various countries, whose information is in the public domain —for example the FAA and the NTSB in the United States, and equivalent bodies elsewhere.
Official flight statistics
Government data on air operations that makes it possible to reconstruct each aircraft's route logbook, year by year.
The airlines and manufacturers themselves
Their press releases, official announcements and public records of deliveries, fleet changes and retirements. When a fact has no other primary source, the source we cite is the airline that operated the aircraft.
Wikipedia and Wikidata
Collaborative encyclopedic data under a free licence, which feeds the airline and airport profiles, their summaries and their history.
Open ADS-B communities
Networks of volunteers who share the ADS-B signal that aircraft themselves broadcast —such as adsb.lol—, the basis of the live position, together with open aircraft and airport catalogues maintained by the community, such as OurAirports and OpenFlights (ODbL licence), which feed the route networks and airport data.
Freely licensed photographs
Images from openly accessible repositories, such as Wikimedia Commons, always crediting the author and the licence; plus the project's own photographs.
How we treat sources. We always prefer the primary source and keep the origin of every piece of data. We do not reproduce third-party listings or protected texts: facts are rewritten in our own voice. And when a piece of data is not reliable, we prefer to leave it out rather than invent it —which is why we document the world's leading civil aircraft, not every single one.
A ranking that explains itself
The Vuelopedia Air Quality Index (IVCA) ranks airlines, airports, alliances and loyalty programmes with a score from 0 to 100. It combines the objective data we calculate ourselves (punctuality, wide-body fleet, environmental certification, network) with the perception measured by the most recognised awards. The weights are public and the calculation is reproducible: anyone can see why an airline ended up where it did.
Who we are: Fundación Poderia
Vuelopedia is a project of Fundación Poderia, a foundation for the ethical implementation of artificial intelligence in Ibero-America.
The foundation promotes the ethical, strategic and socially responsible development of AI: it publishes analysis on its impact on work, mental health, cybersecurity and society, and organises spaces for outreach and reflection such as the PoderIA Congress. Vuelopedia is the practical demonstration of that idea: artificial intelligence put at the service of the common good —to build verifiable, useful knowledge, not to replace or mislead anyone.
Applied ethical AI
The very technology the foundation studies is used here transparently: to organise, verify, explain and document.
An Ibero-American calling
A project conceived in Spanish, with particular care to represent the aviation of the whole region well.
On the public's side
No data sold, no economic interests behind what is shown.
How it is sustained and use of trademarks
Funding
The way the project is sustained is by "registering memories": leaving a name or a story attached to an aircraft's record, as a voluntary and heartfelt contribution. Personal data is not put up for sale.
Aircraft illustrations
Instead of a third-party photograph, each record is headed by the project's own illustration of the aircraft, produced with the help of artificial intelligence tools. They are published as © Fundación Poderia under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence: you may reuse them by crediting the author and the source, and sharing them under the same terms.
Photographs from free sources
Most images come from openly accessible repositories, above all Wikimedia Commons. Each photograph is shown crediting its author and licence, with a link to the original file at the source.
Our own photographs
Images taken by the project are published as © Fundación Poderia under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence: you may reuse them by crediting the source and sharing them under the same terms.
Third-party trademarks
The liveries, logos and trademarks of airlines and manufacturers belong to their owners and are shown for editorial and informational purposes. Vuelopedia is not affiliated with any of them.
Made with rigour and a love of aviation. A project of Fundación Poderia.
