Which plane is that? Identifying aircraft on a live cam

Stream chats are full of people calling out a type before the aircraft has even touched down. It looks like a party trick, but most of it is elimination. Nearly everything you’ll see at a commercial airport is one of about a dozen aircraft, and each has one or two features that give it away, even on a distant camera.

The method is always the same. Count the engines, judge the size, then look at the nose, the wingtips and the tail, in that order.

The big one: 737 or A320?

These two families make up well over half of all airline flights. They’re the same size, both have two engines under the wings, and from a distance they look identical. Get these right and you’ve identified most of the traffic at any airport.

The nose. This is the most reliable tell. The Boeing 737 has a pointed nose, and the Airbus A320 has a rounder, blunter one. Think of the 737 as a sharpened pencil and the A320 as one that’s been used for a while.

The cockpit windows. On the 737, the side windows sweep down into a sharp V at the bottom corner. On the A320 they’re squarer, and the last side window has its top corner cut off at an angle, as if someone clipped it.

The engines. Older 737s sit so low that the engine casings were flattened along the bottom to clear the ground, which makes them look slightly squashed from the front. A320 engines are properly round and hang with more space beneath them.

The tail. A 737’s tail fin has a long, low fillet running forward along the top of the fuselage. An A320’s fin rises straight out of the body.

The wingtips. These tell you the generation as well as the maker.

• A small arrow-shaped fence, pointing up and down: an older A320.
• A tall, smoothly curved blade: a newer A320 or A321 with what Airbus calls sharklets.
• A tall blended winglet: a 737-800 or similar.
• A split tip, one blade up and one down: a 737 MAX, or an older 737 refitted with split scimitars.

If the back edge of the engine casing has a sawtooth pattern, it’s a 737 MAX. Southwest flies nothing but 737s, which makes Chicago Midway and Las Vegas good places to practise.

Widebodies with two engines

This is where most beginners guess. There are four common twin-engine widebodies, and they separate quite cleanly.

Boeing 777. The big one. Each main landing gear leg has six wheels in three pairs, and no other twin has that. The engines are enormous, about as wide as a 737’s cabin. The tail ends in a flat, chisel-shaped cone instead of a point. The 777-300ER has wingtips that sweep back to a point with no winglet at all.

Boeing 787. Look at the wings. They’re long and thin, and they bend upward in flight in a smooth curve, more than any other airliner’s. The nose is smooth with four cockpit windows and no visible step. The engines have the same sawtooth edge as the 737 MAX.

Airbus A350. Two things. The cockpit windows are outlined in black, like a pair of sunglasses or a raccoon’s mask. And the wingtips curl up and back in one continuous sweep. If you see both, it’s an A350.

Airbus A330. The older Airbus widebody. It has a more ordinary-looking nose and winglets that stick up at a sharp angle. The newer A330neo borrows the A350’s black mask and curved tips, which is confusing. When you can’t decide between the two, the airline is usually the quickest way to settle it.

A quick way to split 787 from A350 from far away: the A350 has the mask, the 787 has the bendy wings.

Four engines

Easy, because there are only two left in regular passenger service.

Airbus A380. Two full decks of windows from nose to tail. Nothing else looks like it. Emirates flies most of them, and you’ll see them at Heathrow and LAX.

Boeing 747. The hump. The upper deck covers only the front part of the aircraft. Passenger 747s are now rare, but freighters are everywhere at cargo airports, so Narita, Miami and Hong Kong are your best chances.

There’s also the older Airbus A340, a long, thin four-engine jet. A few are still flying, and Zurich is one of the last places to see them regularly.

Smaller jets and propellers

Airbus A220. Looks like a small airliner that’s been stretched and given engines a size too big. The cockpit windows are large and the nose is slender. Common at Montreal, near where it’s built, and at Zurich.

Embraer 170, 175, 190 and 195. Small jets with engines under the wings and a sharply pointed nose. In the US they fly under names like American Eagle and Delta Connection. In Japan, Fuji Dream Airlines paints each one a different colour.

Bombardier CRJ. The engines are on the back of the fuselage, not under the wings, and the tail is a T shape. Long, thin and low to the ground.

ATR 42 and 72. The wing sits on top of the fuselage, with a propeller on each side. The wheels fold into bulges on the belly of the aircraft.

Dash 8. Also a high wing with propellers, but the wheels fold up into the engine housings under the wing, which makes the legs look long and spindly. The tail is a T. This is the workhorse of Greenland, and you’ll see it on the outer-island flights from Okinawa too.

When you can’t tell

Read the title or the chat. Most streams name the airline, and airline narrows the type quickly: Ryanair and Southwest fly only 737s, easyJet only the A320 family. Flightradar24’s own streams show the type on screen.

The other trick is the registration, the letters and numbers painted near the tail. Type it into any flight tracker and it’ll tell you the exact aircraft, its age and where it’s been this week. Nobody will know you looked it up.

For the vocabulary used above, see the glossary.